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 13 February 2026, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
13 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 293 250 284
Rank change year-on-year -43 +34 +33
Contract jobs citing Algorithms 370 310 367
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.92% 1.00% 0.82%
As % of the Miscellaneous category 2.74% 3.04% 2.69%
Number of daily rates quoted 210 170 242
10th Percentile £350 £380 £401
25th Percentile £448 £450 £483
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £565 £600 £588
Median % change year-on-year -5.83% +2.13% -16.07%
75th Percentile £738 £676 £717
90th Percentile £1,050 £814 £849
UK excluding London median daily rate £508 £550 £575
% change year-on-year -7.73% -4.35% -14.18%
Number of hourly rates quoted 35 16 41
10th Percentile £47.60 £24.04 £41.25
25th Percentile £53.53 £29.06 £52.50
Median hourly rate £65.00 £45.00 £55.00
Median % change year-on-year +44.44% -18.18% -3.27%
75th Percentile - £60.31 £58.75
90th Percentile £73.76 £73.13 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £42.50 £55.00
% change year-on-year +52.94% -22.73% -3.27%

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 13,488 10,203 13,649
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 33.72% 32.95% 30.64%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,530 6,114 8,814
10th Percentile £272 £264 £256
25th Percentile £403 £406 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £651 £650
90th Percentile £738 £765 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 653 310 816
10th Percentile £15.22 £19.96 £13.00
25th Percentile £18.50 £24.18 £16.54
Median hourly rate £30.00 £35.00 £32.31
Median % change year-on-year -14.29% +8.33% +44.68%
75th Percentile £63.75 £65.00 £58.71
90th Percentile £75.00 £82.25 £70.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £30.00 £32.50 £34.61
% change year-on-year -7.69% -6.08% +60.95%

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 13 February 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 13 February 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Algorithms in the UK

Algorithms
Top 16 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 13 February 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 -15 314 £575 -8.08% 295
London +16 183 £650 +4.00% 118
UK excluding London -45 151 £508 -7.73% 246
Work from Home -14 93 £650 +23.81% 104
North of England -47 34 £575 +16.16% 38
South West -10 27 £500 -25.09% 40
East of England -16 27 £345 -46.92% 24
Yorkshire -38 27 £675 - 10
South East -32 24 £593 +12.86% 85
Scotland +7 21 £418 -1.76% 19
West Midlands -39 13 £532 +52.00% 14
Midlands -46 13 £532 +52.00% 31
Wales -14 6 £400 -31.57% 11
North West -47 6 £180 -63.64% 20
Northern Ireland -3 1 - - 4
North East -13 1 £400 -36.00% 8

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 21 (5.68%) Apache Spark
2 16 (4.32%) Apache
3 13 (3.51%) Apache Airflow
3 13 (3.51%) Jupyter
4 8 (2.16%) Apache Pig
5 3 (0.81%) Confluence
5 3 (0.81%) IIS
6 1 (0.27%) Palantir Foundry
Applications
1 18 (4.86%) Microsoft Excel
2 8 (2.16%) Chatbot
3 6 (1.62%) Microsoft Office
3 6 (1.62%) Simulink
4 5 (1.35%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 3 (0.81%) LaTeX
6 1 (0.27%) CPLEX
Business Applications
1 4 (1.08%) ProductWriter
2 3 (0.81%) Bloomberg AIM
2 3 (0.81%) Fidessa
3 1 (0.27%) Actimize
Cloud Services
1 86 (23.24%) AWS
2 77 (20.81%) Azure
3 31 (8.38%) Power Platform
4 28 (7.57%) GCP
5 26 (7.03%) Serverless
6 24 (6.49%) GitHub
7 20 (5.41%) Amazon SageMaker
8 19 (5.14%) Cloud Computing
9 17 (4.59%) AWS Lambda
10 15 (4.05%) Amazon ECS
11 14 (3.78%) Amazon S3
12 13 (3.51%) Azure AKS
13 12 (3.24%) GitHub Copilot
13 12 (3.24%) PaaS
14 11 (2.97%) Amazon EKS
15 9 (2.43%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 9 (2.43%) Azure Functions
15 9 (2.43%) Dagster
15 9 (2.43%) Vertex AI
16 8 (2.16%) Azure Machine Learning
Communications & Networking
1 5 (1.35%) Ethernet
1 5 (1.35%) VPN
2 4 (1.08%) HTTP
2 4 (1.08%) Internet
2 4 (1.08%) S/MIME
3 3 (0.81%) Network Security
4 2 (0.54%) BGP
4 2 (0.54%) BIG-IP
4 2 (0.54%) Ethernet VPN
4 2 (0.54%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
4 2 (0.54%) Firewall
4 2 (0.54%) IPsec
4 2 (0.54%) LTE
4 2 (0.54%) Mobile Backhaul
4 2 (0.54%) MPLS
4 2 (0.54%) OSPF
4 2 (0.54%) Reverse Proxy
4 2 (0.54%) SD-WAN
4 2 (0.54%) SSL
4 2 (0.54%) Wireless
Database & Business Intelligence
1 29 (7.84%) Power BI
2 22 (5.95%) NoSQL
3 20 (5.41%) Hadoop
4 16 (4.32%) Big Data
4 16 (4.32%) Relational Database
5 13 (3.51%) KDB
5 13 (3.51%) Kdb+
5 13 (3.51%) PostgreSQL
5 13 (3.51%) Tableau
6 11 (2.97%) Data Mining
7 9 (2.43%) Apache Hive
8 7 (1.89%) Data Lake
8 7 (1.89%) Data Warehouse
8 7 (1.89%) Elasticsearch
8 7 (1.89%) RDBMS
9 5 (1.35%) MySQL
10 4 (1.08%) Amazon Athena
10 4 (1.08%) SQL Server
11 3 (0.81%) Delta Lake
11 3 (0.81%) Weaviate
Development Applications
1 35 (9.46%) Git
2 13 (3.51%) MLflow
3 12 (3.24%) Jenkins
4 7 (1.89%) GitLab
5 5 (1.35%) Maven
5 5 (1.35%) PyCharm
6 4 (1.08%) Gradle
6 4 (1.08%) JUnit
6 4 (1.08%) QUnit
7 3 (0.81%) JIRA
7 3 (0.81%) Visual Studio
8 2 (0.54%) Cypress.io
8 2 (0.54%) Eclipse
8 2 (0.54%) GoCD
8 2 (0.54%) IntelliJ
8 2 (0.54%) Log4j
8 2 (0.54%) SonarQube
8 2 (0.54%) Sonatype Nexus
8 2 (0.54%) Subversion
8 2 (0.54%) TeamCity
General
1 103 (27.84%) Social Skills
2 66 (17.84%) Finance
3 58 (15.68%) Analytical Skills
4 41 (11.08%) Front Office
5 34 (9.19%) Banking
6 21 (5.68%) Public Sector
7 10 (2.70%) Retail
8 9 (2.43%) Investment Banking
9 7 (1.89%) Electronics
10 6 (1.62%) Manufacturing
10 6 (1.62%) Marketing
11 5 (1.35%) Aerospace
11 5 (1.35%) Games
11 5 (1.35%) Influencing Skills
11 5 (1.35%) Legal
11 5 (1.35%) Presentation Skills
12 4 (1.08%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 4 (1.08%) Law
12 4 (1.08%) Police
12 4 (1.08%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 107 (28.92%) Developer
2 57 (15.41%) Senior
3 52 (14.05%) Data Scientist
4 39 (10.54%) Software Engineer
5 28 (7.57%) Lead
6 26 (7.03%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
7 24 (6.49%) Python Developer
7 24 (6.49%) Senior Developer
8 21 (5.68%) Data Engineer
8 21 (5.68%) Java Developer
8 21 (5.68%) Quantitative Developer
9 20 (5.41%) C++ Developer
10 17 (4.59%) Algorithm Engineer
11 16 (4.32%) Architect
12 13 (3.51%) Analyst
13 12 (3.24%) C++ Quantitative Developer
13 12 (3.24%) Linux Developer
13 12 (3.24%) Low Latency C++ Developer
14 11 (2.97%) Machine Learning Engineer
15 9 (2.43%) Software Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 52 (14.05%) PyTorch
1 52 (14.05%) TensorFlow
2 41 (11.08%) Pandas
3 39 (10.54%) scikit-learn
4 35 (9.46%) NumPy
5 23 (6.22%) FIX Protocol
6 17 (4.59%) RESTful
7 16 (4.32%) .NET
8 15 (4.05%) Model Context Protocol
8 15 (4.05%) REST
9 13 (3.51%) A2A Protocol
9 13 (3.51%) PySpark
9 13 (3.51%) React
9 13 (3.51%) Semantic Kernel
10 12 (3.24%) Kafka
11 11 (2.97%) Matplotlib
12 10 (2.70%) FastAPI
12 10 (2.70%) SQLAlchemy
12 10 (2.70%) XGBoost
13 9 (2.43%) XML
Miscellaneous
1 75 (20.27%) Data Structures
2 28 (7.57%) Equities
3 27 (7.30%) Cloud Native
3 27 (7.30%) Distributed Systems
4 24 (6.49%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
5 20 (5.41%) Derivative
6 19 (5.14%) Fixed Income
7 13 (3.51%) Robotics
8 11 (2.97%) Equity Derivative
8 11 (2.97%) FPGA
8 11 (2.97%) Product Ownership
9 10 (2.70%) Data Protection Act
9 10 (2.70%) Distributed Computing
9 10 (2.70%) PKI
10 8 (2.16%) Clustering
11 7 (1.89%) Legacy Systems
12 6 (1.62%) Onboarding
12 6 (1.62%) VHDL
13 5 (1.35%) PCIe
13 5 (1.35%) Verilog
Operating Systems
1 29 (7.84%) Linux
2 12 (3.24%) Unix
3 4 (1.08%) Android
3 4 (1.08%) Windows
4 3 (0.81%) Apple iOS
5 2 (0.54%) Windows Server
6 1 (0.27%) Embedded Linux
6 1 (0.27%) Robot Operating System
6 1 (0.27%) Solaris
6 1 (0.27%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 186 (50.27%) Machine Learning
2 113 (30.54%) AI
2 113 (30.54%) Data Science
3 92 (24.86%) Problem-Solving
4 88 (23.78%) Computer Science
5 78 (21.08%) CI/CD
6 73 (19.73%) Agile
7 72 (19.46%) Software Engineering
8 65 (17.57%) Analytics
9 60 (16.22%) Data Pipeline
10 59 (15.95%) LLM
10 59 (15.95%) Mathematics
11 51 (13.78%) Statistics
12 49 (13.24%) Visualisation
13 46 (12.43%) Data Engineering
14 45 (12.16%) Deep Learning
15 43 (11.62%) Data Analysis
16 41 (11.08%) Containerisation
16 41 (11.08%) Decision-Making
16 41 (11.08%) Test Automation
Programming Languages
1 211 (57.03%) Python
2 77 (20.81%) SQL
3 72 (19.46%) Java
4 40 (10.81%) C++
5 29 (7.84%) MATLAB
6 22 (5.95%) C#
7 16 (4.32%) PowerShell
7 16 (4.32%) TypeScript
8 14 (3.78%) Scala
9 13 (3.51%) R
10 12 (3.24%) Ada
11 11 (2.97%) Bash
12 10 (2.70%) JavaScript
13 8 (2.16%) Kotlin
14 6 (1.62%) Go
15 5 (1.35%) C
15 5 (1.35%) SystemVerilog
15 5 (1.35%) Tcl
16 2 (0.54%) Perl
16 2 (0.54%) SPARQL
Qualifications
1 83 (22.43%) Degree
2 48 (12.97%) Security Cleared
3 31 (8.38%) SC Cleared
4 27 (7.30%) Computer Science Degree
5 26 (7.03%) Master's Degree
6 15 (4.05%) PhD
7 14 (3.78%) Microsoft Certified Professional
8 12 (3.24%) Numerate Degree
9 6 (1.62%) DV Cleared
10 5 (1.35%) CISSP
10 5 (1.35%) GIAC
10 5 (1.35%) HNC
10 5 (1.35%) HND
11 4 (1.08%) CISM
12 3 (0.81%) BPSS Clearance
12 3 (0.81%) Cisco Certification
12 3 (0.81%) DBS Check
13 2 (0.54%) CESG Certified Professional
13 2 (0.54%) CHECK Team Leader
13 2 (0.54%) CREST Certified
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 15 (4.05%) NIST
1 15 (4.05%) QA
2 12 (3.24%) EU AI Act
3 9 (2.43%) Data Quality
4 8 (2.16%) Accessibility
5 5 (1.35%) DO-254
6 4 (1.08%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 3 (0.81%) Actionable Recommendations
7 3 (0.81%) PCI DSS
7 3 (0.81%) SLA
8 2 (0.54%) Disclosure Scotland
8 2 (0.54%) EMIR
8 2 (0.54%) JSP 440
8 2 (0.54%) NCSC
8 2 (0.54%) RMADS
9 1 (0.27%) FIPS 140-2
9 1 (0.27%) GDPR
System Software
1 40 (10.81%) Docker
2 9 (2.43%) Firmware
3 3 (0.81%) Virtual Machines
4 1 (0.27%) Active Directory
4 1 (0.27%) Oracle RAC
4 1 (0.27%) Squid
Systems Management
1 36 (9.73%) Kubernetes
2 21 (5.68%) Terraform
3 9 (2.43%) Grafana
4 5 (1.35%) Kibana
4 5 (1.35%) logstash
5 4 (1.08%) Ansible
5 4 (1.08%) ITRS Geneos
6 3 (0.81%) Single Sign-On
7 2 (0.54%) Prometheus
7 2 (0.54%) rkt
8 1 (0.27%) Data Guard
8 1 (0.27%) HP Fortify
8 1 (0.27%) Kubeflow
8 1 (0.27%) Oracle ZFS
Vendors
1 40 (10.81%) Microsoft
2 18 (4.86%) Databricks
3 15 (4.05%) Splunk
4 14 (3.78%) Foundry
5 12 (3.24%) Google
6 10 (2.70%) Xilinx
7 9 (2.43%) IBM
8 7 (1.89%) Solace
8 7 (1.89%) Thales
9 6 (1.62%) Oracle
9 6 (1.62%) TIBCO
10 5 (1.35%) Actel
10 5 (1.35%) Altera
10 5 (1.35%) Intel
10 5 (1.35%) MathWorks
10 5 (1.35%) Microsemi
11 4 (1.08%) ION Trading
11 4 (1.08%) SAP
12 3 (0.81%) Bloomberg
12 3 (0.81%) Cognos