Algorithms Contract Job Trends

Algorithms
UK

The table below looks at the prevalence of the term Algorithms in contract job vacancies. Included is a benchmarking guide to the contractor rates offered in vacancies that cited Algorithms over the 6 months leading up to 31 March 2026, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
31 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 298 254 275
Rank change year-on-year -44 +21 +14
Contract jobs citing Algorithms 358 287 371
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.80% 0.99% 0.84%
As % of the Miscellaneous category 2.45% 2.92% 2.76%
Number of daily rates quoted 198 164 225
10th Percentile £335 £400 £413
25th Percentile £448 £459 £484
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £600 £590
Median % change year-on-year -8.33% +1.69% -9.23%
75th Percentile £738 £676 £738
90th Percentile £998 £834 £898
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £548 £550
% change year-on-year -8.68% -0.45% -4.35%
Number of hourly rates quoted 40 20 58
10th Percentile £50.00 £22.72 £34.54
25th Percentile £53.53 £33.09 £47.63
Median hourly rate £65.00 £48.75 £55.00
Median % change year-on-year +33.33% -11.36% +120.00%
75th Percentile - £74.06 £58.75
90th Percentile £70.00 £79.63 £65.90
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £45.00 £55.00
% change year-on-year +44.44% -18.18% +150.00%

All Generic Skills
UK

Algorithms falls under the General and Transferable Skills category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring generic IT skills.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for generic IT skills 14,617 9,829 13,418
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 32.83% 33.81% 30.31%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,187 6,301 8,593
10th Percentile £300 £296 £259
25th Percentile £410 £410 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £535
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -1.87% -2.73%
75th Percentile £625 £650 £650
90th Percentile £738 £775 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 688 377 889
10th Percentile £15.72 £16.95 £12.26
25th Percentile £19.33 £22.50 £15.39
Median hourly rate £42.60 £32.50 £27.50
Median % change year-on-year +31.08% +18.18% +22.30%
75th Percentile £70.00 £65.00 £57.50
90th Percentile £85.43 £83.20 £67.38
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.46 £32.50 £25.50
% change year-on-year +39.88% +27.45% +15.91%

Algorithms
Job Vacancy Trend

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing Algorithms relative to all contract IT jobs advertised.

Algorithms job vacancy trend in the UK

Algorithms
Daily Rate Trend

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Algorithms.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Algorithms

Algorithms
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Algorithms over the 6 months to 31 March 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Algorithms in the UK

Algorithms
Hourly Rate Trend

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Algorithms.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Algorithms

Algorithms
Hourly Rate Histogram

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Algorithms over the 6 months to 31 March 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Algorithms in the UK

Algorithms
Top 15 Contract Job Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Algorithms within the UK over the 6 months to 31 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
Contract
IT Job Ads
Median
Daily Rate
Past 6 Months
Median Daily Rate
% Change
on Same Period
Last Year
Live
Jobs
England -44 297 £550 -12.00% 407
London -18 166 £625 -3.85% 126
UK excluding London -88 141 £500 -8.68% 335
Work from Home -18 104 £638 +19.16% 115
South West -4 38 £500 -25.09% 56
South East -48 31 £550 +10.00% 101
East of England -30 28 £345 -46.92% 48
North of England -73 21 £500 -9.09% 56
Yorkshire -42 13 £695 - 15
Scotland -6 12 £622 +46.35% 18
North West -48 8 £190 -65.30% 28
Wales -17 5 £475 -18.73% 8
West Midlands -52 4 £538 - 21
Midlands -64 4 £538 +667.86% 48
Northern Ireland -3 2 - - 10

Algorithms
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 19 (5.31%) Apache Spark
2 17 (4.75%) Apache Airflow
3 11 (3.07%) Jupyter
4 9 (2.51%) Apache
5 2 (0.56%) Confluence
6 1 (0.28%) Ethereum
6 1 (0.28%) Palantir Foundry
6 1 (0.28%) Solana
Applications
1 16 (4.47%) Microsoft Excel
2 7 (1.96%) Chatbot
3 5 (1.40%) Microsoft Office
4 4 (1.12%) CPLEX
4 4 (1.12%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 4 (1.12%) Simulink
5 3 (0.84%) LaTeX
Business Applications
1 6 (1.68%) SAP IBP
2 4 (1.12%) Bloomberg AIM
2 4 (1.12%) Fidessa
3 3 (0.84%) ProductWriter
4 1 (0.28%) Actimize
4 1 (0.28%) SAP APO
Cloud Services
1 77 (21.51%) AWS
2 73 (20.39%) Azure
3 34 (9.50%) GCP
4 23 (6.42%) Cloud Computing
5 21 (5.87%) Power Platform
6 20 (5.59%) GitHub
7 15 (4.19%) Amazon SageMaker
7 15 (4.19%) Serverless
8 14 (3.91%) Amazon ECS
9 11 (3.07%) AWS Lambda
9 11 (3.07%) Dagster
9 11 (3.07%) Snowflake
10 9 (2.51%) Amazon EKS
10 9 (2.51%) Vertex AI
11 8 (2.23%) Azure Machine Learning
11 8 (2.23%) PaaS
12 7 (1.96%) Amazon CloudWatch
12 7 (1.96%) Amazon S3
12 7 (1.96%) Azure AKS
12 7 (1.96%) GitHub Actions
Communications & Networking
1 5 (1.40%) HTTP
1 5 (1.40%) Network Security
1 5 (1.40%) VPN
2 4 (1.12%) BIG-IP
2 4 (1.12%) Ethernet
2 4 (1.12%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
2 4 (1.12%) Firewall
2 4 (1.12%) Internet
2 4 (1.12%) S/MIME
3 3 (0.84%) Multicast
3 3 (0.84%) SSL
4 2 (0.56%) 2G
4 2 (0.56%) 5G
4 2 (0.56%) Ethernet VPN
4 2 (0.56%) IPsec
4 2 (0.56%) LTE
4 2 (0.56%) Mobile Backhaul
4 2 (0.56%) Reverse Proxy
4 2 (0.56%) SD-WAN
4 2 (0.56%) VXLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 19 (5.31%) Power BI
2 18 (5.03%) Big Data
2 18 (5.03%) NoSQL
3 15 (4.19%) Tableau
4 14 (3.91%) PostgreSQL
4 14 (3.91%) Relational Database
5 12 (3.35%) Hadoop
6 10 (2.79%) KDB
7 7 (1.96%) Kdb+
8 6 (1.68%) RDBMS
9 5 (1.40%) MySQL
9 5 (1.40%) SQL Server
10 4 (1.12%) Amazon Athena
10 4 (1.12%) Data Lake
10 4 (1.12%) Data Warehouse
10 4 (1.12%) MongoDB
10 4 (1.12%) Pinecone
10 4 (1.12%) Weaviate
11 3 (0.84%) Delta Lake
12 2 (0.56%) Power Query
Development Applications
1 37 (10.34%) Git
2 11 (3.07%) MLflow
3 7 (1.96%) GitLab
3 7 (1.96%) Jenkins
4 5 (1.40%) PyCharm
5 3 (0.84%) Visual Studio
6 2 (0.56%) Cypress.io
6 2 (0.56%) Gradle
6 2 (0.56%) Hardhat
6 2 (0.56%) JIRA
6 2 (0.56%) JUnit
6 2 (0.56%) Maven
7 1 (0.28%) Octopus Deploy
7 1 (0.28%) Oracle Forms
7 1 (0.28%) Postman
7 1 (0.28%) REST Assured
7 1 (0.28%) Selenium
7 1 (0.28%) SoapUI
7 1 (0.28%) TeamCity
7 1 (0.28%) webpack
General
1 95 (26.54%) Social Skills
2 64 (17.88%) Analytical Skills
3 52 (14.53%) Finance
4 32 (8.94%) Front Office
5 30 (8.38%) Banking
6 21 (5.87%) Public Sector
7 9 (2.51%) Aerospace
7 9 (2.51%) Investment Banking
8 8 (2.23%) Electronics
8 8 (2.23%) Retail
8 8 (2.23%) Telecoms
9 7 (1.96%) Marketing
10 6 (1.68%) Aviation
11 5 (1.40%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 5 (1.40%) Manufacturing
11 5 (1.40%) Presentation Skills
12 4 (1.12%) Games
12 4 (1.12%) Law
12 4 (1.12%) Police
12 4 (1.12%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 104 (29.05%) Developer
2 60 (16.76%) Senior
3 48 (13.41%) Software Engineer
4 46 (12.85%) Data Scientist
5 30 (8.38%) Python Developer
6 29 (8.10%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
7 27 (7.54%) Algorithm Engineer
8 23 (6.42%) Senior Developer
9 22 (6.15%) C++ Developer
10 21 (5.87%) Lead
11 20 (5.59%) Java Developer
12 18 (5.03%) Quantitative Developer
13 16 (4.47%) Architect
14 11 (3.07%) C++ Quantitative Developer
14 11 (3.07%) Gen AI Engineer
14 11 (3.07%) Linux Developer
14 11 (3.07%) Low Latency C++ Developer
15 9 (2.51%) Robotics Engineer
16 8 (2.23%) Consultant
16 8 (2.23%) Senior C++ Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 52 (14.53%) TensorFlow
2 51 (14.25%) PyTorch
3 39 (10.89%) Pandas
4 36 (10.06%) scikit-learn
5 33 (9.22%) NumPy
6 22 (6.15%) FIX Protocol
7 14 (3.91%) .NET
7 14 (3.91%) REST
8 13 (3.63%) React
8 13 (3.63%) RESTful
9 12 (3.35%) PySpark
10 11 (3.07%) Kafka
10 11 (3.07%) Matplotlib
10 11 (3.07%) Seaborn
11 10 (2.79%) Model Context Protocol
12 9 (2.51%) FastAPI
12 9 (2.51%) Hugging Face
12 9 (2.51%) XGBoost
13 8 (2.23%) A2A Protocol
13 8 (2.23%) Semantic Kernel
Miscellaneous
1 70 (19.55%) Data Structures
2 32 (8.94%) Distributed Systems
2 32 (8.94%) Equities
3 23 (6.42%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
4 19 (5.31%) Cloud Native
4 19 (5.31%) Derivative
5 16 (4.47%) Robotics
6 11 (3.07%) Equity Derivative
6 11 (3.07%) Fixed Income
7 9 (2.51%) Data Protection Act
7 9 (2.51%) PKI
8 8 (2.23%) Product Ownership
9 7 (1.96%) Clustering
10 6 (1.68%) Legacy Systems
11 5 (1.40%) FPGA
11 5 (1.40%) Greenfield Project
11 5 (1.40%) IoT
11 5 (1.40%) Onboarding
12 4 (1.12%) Online Banking
12 4 (1.12%) Verilog
Operating Systems
1 18 (5.03%) Linux
2 7 (1.96%) Unix
3 3 (0.84%) Windows
4 2 (0.56%) Android
5 1 (0.28%) Apple iOS
5 1 (0.28%) Embedded Linux
5 1 (0.28%) Robot Operating System
5 1 (0.28%) Solaris
5 1 (0.28%) VMS
5 1 (0.28%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 164 (45.81%) Machine Learning
2 113 (31.56%) AI
3 90 (25.14%) Computer Science
4 86 (24.02%) Data Science
5 80 (22.35%) CI/CD
6 79 (22.07%) Problem-Solving
7 76 (21.23%) Software Engineering
8 66 (18.44%) Analytics
9 60 (16.76%) Agile
10 55 (15.36%) Mathematics
11 54 (15.08%) LLM
12 52 (14.53%) Data Pipeline
13 50 (13.97%) Statistics
14 48 (13.41%) Data Engineering
15 41 (11.45%) Test Automation
16 39 (10.89%) Containerisation
16 39 (10.89%) Data Analysis
16 39 (10.89%) Natural Language Processing
17 37 (10.34%) Generative AI
18 36 (10.06%) Low Latency
Programming Languages
1 194 (54.19%) Python
2 67 (18.72%) SQL
3 56 (15.64%) Java
4 38 (10.61%) C++
5 29 (8.10%) MATLAB
6 27 (7.54%) C#
7 19 (5.31%) Ada
8 17 (4.75%) TypeScript
9 16 (4.47%) R
10 15 (4.19%) PowerShell
11 12 (3.35%) JavaScript
12 11 (3.07%) Kotlin
13 10 (2.79%) Bash
14 7 (1.96%) C
14 7 (1.96%) Go
15 4 (1.12%) SystemVerilog
15 4 (1.12%) Tcl
16 3 (0.84%) SPARQL
17 2 (0.56%) Data Analysis Expressions
17 2 (0.56%) Scala
Qualifications
1 89 (24.86%) Degree
2 47 (13.13%) Security Cleared
3 25 (6.98%) Computer Science Degree
3 25 (6.98%) Master's Degree
4 24 (6.70%) SC Cleared
5 16 (4.47%) PhD
6 13 (3.63%) Numerate Degree
7 11 (3.07%) BPSS Clearance
8 9 (2.51%) Microsoft Certified Professional
9 7 (1.96%) DBS Check
10 6 (1.68%) DV Cleared
11 4 (1.12%) CISM
11 4 (1.12%) CISSP
11 4 (1.12%) GIAC
11 4 (1.12%) HNC
11 4 (1.12%) HND
12 3 (0.84%) Cisco Certification
13 2 (0.56%) CCIE
13 2 (0.56%) CESG Certified Professional
13 2 (0.56%) CHECK Team Leader
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 15 (4.19%) QA
2 10 (2.79%) NIST
3 9 (2.51%) Data Quality
4 7 (1.96%) EU AI Act
5 6 (1.68%) Accessibility
6 4 (1.12%) Actionable Recommendations
6 4 (1.12%) DO-254
6 4 (1.12%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 3 (0.84%) SLA
8 2 (0.56%) JSP 440
8 2 (0.56%) NCSC
8 2 (0.56%) PCI DSS
8 2 (0.56%) RMADS
9 1 (0.28%) Disclosure Scotland
9 1 (0.28%) GDPR
System Software
1 39 (10.89%) Docker
2 8 (2.23%) Firmware
3 1 (0.28%) Active Directory
3 1 (0.28%) Oracle RAC
3 1 (0.28%) Squid
Systems Management
1 23 (6.42%) Kubernetes
2 16 (4.47%) Terraform
3 8 (2.23%) Grafana
4 3 (0.84%) Ansible
4 3 (0.84%) Kubeflow
4 3 (0.84%) Single Sign-On
5 2 (0.56%) Kibana
5 2 (0.56%) logstash
5 2 (0.56%) Prometheus
6 1 (0.28%) Data Guard
6 1 (0.28%) HP Fortify
6 1 (0.28%) ITRS Geneos
6 1 (0.28%) Oracle ZFS
Vendors
1 25 (6.98%) Databricks
1 25 (6.98%) Microsoft
2 12 (3.35%) IBM
3 10 (2.79%) Google
4 9 (2.51%) Foundry
5 8 (2.23%) MathWorks
5 8 (2.23%) SAP
6 6 (1.68%) Solace
6 6 (1.68%) Thales
7 5 (1.40%) Oracle
8 4 (1.12%) Actel
8 4 (1.12%) Altera
8 4 (1.12%) AppDynamics
8 4 (1.12%) Bloomberg
8 4 (1.12%) Charles River
8 4 (1.12%) F5
8 4 (1.12%) Intel
8 4 (1.12%) ION Trading
8 4 (1.12%) Splunk
8 4 (1.12%) Xilinx