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

6 months to
23 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 295 256 280
Rank change year-on-year -39 +24 +18
Contract jobs citing Algorithms 360 296 370
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.89% 0.97% 0.83%
As % of the Miscellaneous category 2.65% 2.92% 2.73%
Number of daily rates quoted 201 162 242
10th Percentile £335 £375 £401
25th Percentile £425 £450 £477
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £594 £581
Median % change year-on-year -7.41% +2.19% -13.89%
75th Percentile £738 £676 £721
90th Percentile £1,050 £823 £864
UK excluding London median daily rate £504 £550 £561
% change year-on-year -8.41% -2.00% -8.37%
Number of hourly rates quoted 36 17 44
10th Percentile £48.00 £24.30 £41.63
25th Percentile £53.53 £30.00 £52.50
Median hourly rate £65.00 £45.00 £55.00
Median % change year-on-year +44.44% -18.18% -3.27%
75th Percentile - £65.00 £59.69
90th Percentile £70.88 £75.00 £71.15
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £45.00 £55.00
% change year-on-year +44.44% -18.18% -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 13,598 10,138 13,533
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 33.45% 33.22% 30.41%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,576 6,137 8,717
10th Percentile £275 £270 £257
25th Percentile £405 £406 £410
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £530
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -0.94% -3.64%
75th Percentile £625 £650 £650
90th Percentile £738 £764 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £495 £500
% change year-on-year -4.04% -1.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 646 320 829
10th Percentile £15.42 £18.51 £13.00
25th Percentile £18.50 £23.30 £16.50
Median hourly rate £30.50 £33.27 £31.50
Median % change year-on-year -8.33% +5.62% +40.09%
75th Percentile £65.00 £65.25 £57.50
90th Percentile £77.00 £82.57 £70.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £30.05 £32.50 £34.21
% change year-on-year -7.53% -5.00% +55.50%

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 23 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 23 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 23 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 -14 300 £575 -5.67% 287
London +7 174 £650 +6.12% 112
UK excluding London -47 146 £504 -8.41% 230
Work from Home -7 95 £638 +21.43% 114
South West -8 29 £500 -25.09% 39
North of England -47 29 £575 +16.16% 36
East of England -23 28 £345 -46.92% 33
South East -20 26 £593 +12.86% 72
Yorkshire -37 22 £675 - 7
Scotland +8 21 £418 -1.76% 15
Midlands -49 8 £532 +156.39% 29
West Midlands -50 8 £532 +43.78% 14
Wales -15 6 £400 -31.57% 10
North West -45 6 £180 -63.64% 20
Northern Ireland -1 1 - - 3
North East -16 1 £400 -36.00% 9

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 22 (6.11%) Apache Spark
2 13 (3.61%) Apache Airflow
3 12 (3.33%) Apache
3 12 (3.33%) Jupyter
4 3 (0.83%) Apache Pig
5 2 (0.56%) Confluence
6 1 (0.28%) Palantir Foundry
Applications
1 17 (4.72%) Microsoft Excel
2 8 (2.22%) Chatbot
3 6 (1.67%) Microsoft Office
3 6 (1.67%) Simulink
4 5 (1.39%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 3 (0.83%) LaTeX
6 1 (0.28%) CPLEX
Business Applications
1 4 (1.11%) Bloomberg AIM
1 4 (1.11%) Fidessa
2 3 (0.83%) ProductWriter
3 1 (0.28%) Actimize
3 1 (0.28%) SAP IBP
Cloud Services
1 89 (24.72%) AWS
2 78 (21.67%) Azure
3 27 (7.50%) GCP
4 26 (7.22%) Power Platform
4 26 (7.22%) Serverless
5 23 (6.39%) GitHub
6 20 (5.56%) Amazon SageMaker
7 19 (5.28%) Cloud Computing
8 17 (4.72%) AWS Lambda
9 16 (4.44%) Amazon ECS
10 14 (3.89%) Amazon S3
11 13 (3.61%) Azure AKS
12 12 (3.33%) Amazon EKS
12 12 (3.33%) GitHub Copilot
12 12 (3.33%) PaaS
13 9 (2.50%) Amazon CloudWatch
13 9 (2.50%) Azure Functions
13 9 (2.50%) Dagster
14 8 (2.22%) AWS CloudFormation
14 8 (2.22%) Vertex AI
Communications & Networking
1 5 (1.39%) Ethernet
1 5 (1.39%) VPN
2 4 (1.11%) HTTP
2 4 (1.11%) Internet
2 4 (1.11%) S/MIME
3 3 (0.83%) Network Security
4 2 (0.56%) 2G
4 2 (0.56%) 5G
4 2 (0.56%) BGP
4 2 (0.56%) BIG-IP
4 2 (0.56%) Ethernet VPN
4 2 (0.56%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
4 2 (0.56%) Firewall
4 2 (0.56%) IPsec
4 2 (0.56%) LTE
4 2 (0.56%) Mobile Backhaul
4 2 (0.56%) MPLS
4 2 (0.56%) OSPF
4 2 (0.56%) SD-WAN
4 2 (0.56%) VXLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 24 (6.67%) Power BI
2 22 (6.11%) NoSQL
3 17 (4.72%) Hadoop
4 16 (4.44%) Big Data
4 16 (4.44%) Relational Database
5 14 (3.89%) Tableau
6 13 (3.61%) PostgreSQL
7 11 (3.06%) KDB
7 11 (3.06%) Kdb+
8 7 (1.94%) Data Lake
8 7 (1.94%) Data Warehouse
8 7 (1.94%) RDBMS
9 5 (1.39%) Data Mining
9 5 (1.39%) MySQL
10 4 (1.11%) Amazon Athena
10 4 (1.11%) Apache Hive
10 4 (1.11%) Elasticsearch
10 4 (1.11%) SQL Server
11 3 (0.83%) Delta Lake
11 3 (0.83%) Weaviate
Development Applications
1 34 (9.44%) Git
2 13 (3.61%) MLflow
3 10 (2.78%) Jenkins
4 7 (1.94%) GitLab
5 5 (1.39%) PyCharm
6 4 (1.11%) JUnit
6 4 (1.11%) Maven
7 3 (0.83%) Gradle
7 3 (0.83%) QUnit
7 3 (0.83%) Visual Studio
8 2 (0.56%) Cypress.io
8 2 (0.56%) GoCD
8 2 (0.56%) JIRA
8 2 (0.56%) Log4j
8 2 (0.56%) Mockito
8 2 (0.56%) SonarQube
8 2 (0.56%) Sonatype Nexus
8 2 (0.56%) Subversion
8 2 (0.56%) TeamCity
9 1 (0.28%) Hardhat
General
1 101 (28.06%) Social Skills
2 64 (17.78%) Finance
3 57 (15.83%) Analytical Skills
4 38 (10.56%) Front Office
5 34 (9.44%) Banking
6 21 (5.83%) Public Sector
7 9 (2.50%) Investment Banking
7 9 (2.50%) Retail
8 7 (1.94%) Electronics
9 6 (1.67%) Aerospace
9 6 (1.67%) Manufacturing
9 6 (1.67%) Marketing
9 6 (1.67%) Telecoms
10 5 (1.39%) Games
10 5 (1.39%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 5 (1.39%) Influencing Skills
10 5 (1.39%) Presentation Skills
11 4 (1.11%) Law
11 4 (1.11%) Legal
11 4 (1.11%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 104 (28.89%) Developer
2 60 (16.67%) Senior
3 46 (12.78%) Data Scientist
4 40 (11.11%) Software Engineer
5 27 (7.50%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
5 27 (7.50%) Lead
6 24 (6.67%) Python Developer
6 24 (6.67%) Senior Developer
7 21 (5.83%) Quantitative Developer
8 20 (5.56%) C++ Developer
9 19 (5.28%) Algorithm Engineer
9 19 (5.28%) Java Developer
10 18 (5.00%) Architect
11 14 (3.89%) Data Engineer
12 12 (3.33%) C++ Quantitative Developer
12 12 (3.33%) Linux Developer
12 12 (3.33%) Low Latency C++ Developer
13 10 (2.78%) Analyst
13 10 (2.78%) Machine Learning Engineer
14 9 (2.50%) Robotics Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 54 (15.00%) PyTorch
2 53 (14.72%) TensorFlow
3 40 (11.11%) Pandas
4 38 (10.56%) scikit-learn
5 35 (9.72%) NumPy
6 20 (5.56%) FIX Protocol
7 18 (5.00%) .NET
8 17 (4.72%) RESTful
9 15 (4.17%) Model Context Protocol
9 15 (4.17%) React
10 14 (3.89%) REST
11 13 (3.61%) A2A Protocol
11 13 (3.61%) Kafka
11 13 (3.61%) PySpark
11 13 (3.61%) Semantic Kernel
12 11 (3.06%) Matplotlib
13 10 (2.78%) FastAPI
13 10 (2.78%) SQLAlchemy
14 9 (2.50%) Hugging Face
14 9 (2.50%) Seaborn
Miscellaneous
1 76 (21.11%) Data Structures
2 29 (8.06%) Equities
3 25 (6.94%) Cloud Native
3 25 (6.94%) Distributed Systems
4 24 (6.67%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
5 20 (5.56%) Derivative
6 17 (4.72%) Fixed Income
7 13 (3.61%) Robotics
8 11 (3.06%) Data Protection Act
8 11 (3.06%) Equity Derivative
8 11 (3.06%) Product Ownership
9 10 (2.78%) FPGA
10 9 (2.50%) Distributed Computing
10 9 (2.50%) PKI
11 8 (2.22%) Clustering
12 7 (1.94%) Legacy Systems
13 6 (1.67%) Onboarding
14 5 (1.39%) Greenfield Project
14 5 (1.39%) PCIe
14 5 (1.39%) VHDL
Operating Systems
1 26 (7.22%) Linux
2 11 (3.06%) Unix
3 4 (1.11%) Android
3 4 (1.11%) Windows
4 3 (0.83%) Apple iOS
5 2 (0.56%) Windows Server
6 1 (0.28%) Embedded Linux
6 1 (0.28%) Robot Operating System
6 1 (0.28%) Solaris
6 1 (0.28%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 177 (49.17%) Machine Learning
2 113 (31.39%) AI
3 103 (28.61%) Data Science
4 96 (26.67%) Problem-Solving
5 89 (24.72%) Computer Science
6 76 (21.11%) CI/CD
7 73 (20.28%) Agile
8 72 (20.00%) Software Engineering
9 64 (17.78%) Analytics
10 60 (16.67%) LLM
11 59 (16.39%) Data Pipeline
12 58 (16.11%) Mathematics
13 47 (13.06%) Statistics
14 46 (12.78%) Data Engineering
15 45 (12.50%) Deep Learning
16 44 (12.22%) Visualisation
17 43 (11.94%) Data Analysis
18 42 (11.67%) Containerisation
18 42 (11.67%) Test Automation
19 39 (10.83%) Natural Language Processing
Programming Languages
1 202 (56.11%) Python
2 70 (19.44%) SQL
3 63 (17.50%) Java
4 38 (10.56%) C++
5 29 (8.06%) MATLAB
6 23 (6.39%) C#
7 17 (4.72%) TypeScript
8 14 (3.89%) PowerShell
8 14 (3.89%) R
9 13 (3.61%) Ada
10 12 (3.33%) JavaScript
11 11 (3.06%) Bash
12 8 (2.22%) Go
12 8 (2.22%) Kotlin
13 6 (1.67%) Scala
14 5 (1.39%) C
14 5 (1.39%) SystemVerilog
14 5 (1.39%) Tcl
15 2 (0.56%) Data Analysis Expressions
15 2 (0.56%) Rust
Qualifications
1 85 (23.61%) Degree
2 49 (13.61%) Security Cleared
3 31 (8.61%) SC Cleared
4 26 (7.22%) Master's Degree
5 24 (6.67%) Computer Science Degree
6 16 (4.44%) PhD
7 14 (3.89%) Microsoft Certified Professional
8 12 (3.33%) Numerate Degree
9 6 (1.67%) DV Cleared
10 5 (1.39%) BPSS Clearance
10 5 (1.39%) GIAC
10 5 (1.39%) HNC
10 5 (1.39%) HND
11 4 (1.11%) CISM
11 4 (1.11%) CISSP
12 3 (0.83%) Cisco Certification
12 3 (0.83%) DBS Check
13 2 (0.56%) CCDP
13 2 (0.56%) CCIE
13 2 (0.56%) FFIEC
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 15 (4.17%) NIST
2 14 (3.89%) QA
3 12 (3.33%) EU AI Act
4 10 (2.78%) Data Quality
5 9 (2.50%) Accessibility
6 5 (1.39%) DO-254
7 4 (1.11%) Actionable Recommendations
7 4 (1.11%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 3 (0.83%) SLA
9 2 (0.56%) Disclosure Scotland
9 2 (0.56%) JSP 440
9 2 (0.56%) NCSC
9 2 (0.56%) PCI DSS
9 2 (0.56%) RMADS
10 1 (0.28%) EMIR
10 1 (0.28%) GDPR
System Software
1 38 (10.56%) Docker
2 9 (2.50%) Firmware
3 1 (0.28%) Active Directory
3 1 (0.28%) Oracle RAC
3 1 (0.28%) Squid
Systems Management
1 34 (9.44%) Kubernetes
2 21 (5.83%) Terraform
3 10 (2.78%) Grafana
4 4 (1.11%) Ansible
5 3 (0.83%) Kibana
5 3 (0.83%) logstash
5 3 (0.83%) Single Sign-On
6 2 (0.56%) ITRS Geneos
6 2 (0.56%) Prometheus
6 2 (0.56%) rkt
7 1 (0.28%) Data Guard
7 1 (0.28%) HP Fortify
7 1 (0.28%) Kubeflow
7 1 (0.28%) Oracle ZFS
Vendors
1 33 (9.17%) Microsoft
2 17 (4.72%) Databricks
3 14 (3.89%) Foundry
4 12 (3.33%) Google
5 10 (2.78%) Splunk
6 9 (2.50%) IBM
6 9 (2.50%) Xilinx
7 6 (1.67%) Thales
8 5 (1.39%) Actel
8 5 (1.39%) Altera
8 5 (1.39%) Intel
8 5 (1.39%) MathWorks
8 5 (1.39%) Microsemi
8 5 (1.39%) Oracle
8 5 (1.39%) SAP
8 5 (1.39%) Solace
9 4 (1.11%) AppDynamics
9 4 (1.11%) Bloomberg
9 4 (1.11%) ION Trading
9 4 (1.11%) TIBCO