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 20 March 2026, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
20 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 300 261 257
Rank change year-on-year -39 -4 +29
Contract jobs citing Algorithms 361 285 395
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.83% 0.97% 0.89%
As % of the Miscellaneous category 2.50% 2.89% 2.94%
Number of daily rates quoted 197 159 246
10th Percentile £335 £375 £408
25th Percentile £409 £452 £488
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £594 £595
Median % change year-on-year -7.41% -0.17% -8.07%
75th Percentile £738 £676 £734
90th Percentile £1,050 £828 £870
UK excluding London median daily rate £445 £545 £575
% change year-on-year -18.35% -5.22% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 37 21 57
10th Percentile £48.40 £22.72 £38.51
25th Percentile £53.53 £34.13 £48.00
Median hourly rate £65.00 £52.50 £55.00
Median % change year-on-year +23.81% -4.55% +83.33%
75th Percentile - £73.75 £58.75
90th Percentile - £78.70 £66.20
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £50.00 £55.00
% change year-on-year +30.00% -9.09% +111.54%

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 14,428 9,863 13,430
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 33.17% 33.71% 30.31%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,080 6,264 8,612
10th Percentile £300 £287 £255
25th Percentile £408 £409 £411
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.71% - -4.55%
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 675 368 862
10th Percentile £15.54 £16.95 £12.50
25th Percentile £18.87 £22.26 £15.45
Median hourly rate £36.70 £32.50 £27.50
Median % change year-on-year +12.92% +18.18% +22.22%
75th Percentile £68.75 £65.00 £57.50
90th Percentile £85.00 £83.20 £67.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £41.94 £31.08 £26.00
% change year-on-year +34.94% +19.54% +16.80%

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 20 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 20 March 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 20 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 -30 296 £558 -9.90% 428
London -1 169 £625 -3.85% 114
UK excluding London -69 144 £445 -18.35% 369
Work from Home -15 101 £650 +21.50% 119
South West -9 34 £500 -25.09% 60
South East -53 30 £568 +13.50% 102
East of England -17 28 £345 -46.92% 58
North of England -73 23 £508 -5.14% 67
Scotland +2 16 £402 -5.35% 18
Yorkshire -45 15 £695 - 22
Wales -15 7 £475 -18.73% 10
North West -48 7 £180 -65.71% 30
West Midlands -61 4 £538 +58.09% 21
Midlands -63 4 £538 +616.67% 52
Northern Ireland -5 2 - - 12
North East -14 1 £400 -36.00% 16

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 24 (6.65%) Apache Spark
2 16 (4.43%) Apache Airflow
3 12 (3.32%) Jupyter
4 11 (3.05%) Apache
5 2 (0.55%) Confluence
6 1 (0.28%) Palantir Foundry
Applications
1 18 (4.99%) Microsoft Excel
2 8 (2.22%) Chatbot
3 7 (1.94%) Microsoft Office
4 6 (1.66%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 4 (1.11%) Simulink
6 3 (0.83%) CPLEX
6 3 (0.83%) LaTeX
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 84 (23.27%) AWS
2 75 (20.78%) Azure
3 34 (9.42%) GCP
4 23 (6.37%) Cloud Computing
4 23 (6.37%) Power Platform
5 21 (5.82%) GitHub
6 20 (5.54%) Amazon SageMaker
6 20 (5.54%) Serverless
7 15 (4.16%) AWS Lambda
8 14 (3.88%) Amazon ECS
9 11 (3.05%) Amazon S3
9 11 (3.05%) Dagster
9 11 (3.05%) Snowflake
10 10 (2.77%) Amazon EKS
11 9 (2.49%) Vertex AI
12 8 (2.22%) AWS CloudFormation
12 8 (2.22%) Azure AKS
12 8 (2.22%) Azure Machine Learning
12 8 (2.22%) GitHub Copilot
12 8 (2.22%) PaaS
Communications & Networking
1 5 (1.39%) VPN
2 4 (1.11%) Ethernet
2 4 (1.11%) HTTP
2 4 (1.11%) Internet
2 4 (1.11%) Network Security
2 4 (1.11%) S/MIME
3 3 (0.83%) BIG-IP
3 3 (0.83%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
3 3 (0.83%) Firewall
4 2 (0.55%) 2G
4 2 (0.55%) 5G
4 2 (0.55%) Ethernet VPN
4 2 (0.55%) IPsec
4 2 (0.55%) LTE
4 2 (0.55%) Mobile Backhaul
4 2 (0.55%) MPLS
4 2 (0.55%) Reverse Proxy
4 2 (0.55%) SD-WAN
4 2 (0.55%) SSL
4 2 (0.55%) VXLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 21 (5.82%) Power BI
2 20 (5.54%) Big Data
2 20 (5.54%) NoSQL
3 17 (4.71%) Tableau
4 16 (4.43%) Relational Database
5 15 (4.16%) PostgreSQL
6 14 (3.88%) Hadoop
7 9 (2.49%) KDB
7 9 (2.49%) Kdb+
8 7 (1.94%) Data Lake
8 7 (1.94%) Data Warehouse
9 6 (1.66%) RDBMS
10 5 (1.39%) MySQL
10 5 (1.39%) SQL Server
11 4 (1.11%) Amazon Athena
11 4 (1.11%) MongoDB
11 4 (1.11%) Pinecone
11 4 (1.11%) Weaviate
12 3 (0.83%) Delta Lake
13 2 (0.55%) Power Query
Development Applications
1 40 (11.08%) Git
2 14 (3.88%) MLflow
3 9 (2.49%) Jenkins
4 7 (1.94%) GitLab
5 5 (1.39%) PyCharm
6 3 (0.83%) QUnit
6 3 (0.83%) TeamCity
6 3 (0.83%) Visual Studio
7 2 (0.55%) Cypress.io
7 2 (0.55%) GoCD
7 2 (0.55%) Gradle
7 2 (0.55%) JIRA
7 2 (0.55%) JUnit
7 2 (0.55%) Maven
7 2 (0.55%) SonarQube
7 2 (0.55%) Sonatype Nexus
8 1 (0.28%) Hardhat
8 1 (0.28%) Postman
8 1 (0.28%) REST Assured
8 1 (0.28%) webpack
General
1 96 (26.59%) Social Skills
2 62 (17.17%) Analytical Skills
3 57 (15.79%) Finance
4 33 (9.14%) Banking
4 33 (9.14%) Front Office
5 21 (5.82%) Public Sector
6 9 (2.49%) Retail
7 8 (2.22%) Aerospace
7 8 (2.22%) Electronics
7 8 (2.22%) Investment Banking
8 7 (1.94%) Marketing
8 7 (1.94%) Telecoms
9 6 (1.66%) Manufacturing
10 5 (1.39%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 5 (1.39%) Influencing Skills
10 5 (1.39%) Law
10 5 (1.39%) Legal
10 5 (1.39%) Presentation Skills
11 4 (1.11%) Aviation
11 4 (1.11%) Documentation Skills
Job Titles
1 106 (29.36%) Developer
2 62 (17.17%) Senior
3 46 (12.74%) Data Scientist
4 44 (12.19%) Software Engineer
5 30 (8.31%) Python Developer
6 29 (8.03%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
7 25 (6.93%) Lead
8 23 (6.37%) Algorithm Engineer
8 23 (6.37%) Senior Developer
9 21 (5.82%) C++ Developer
10 20 (5.54%) Quantitative Developer
11 17 (4.71%) Java Developer
12 15 (4.16%) Architect
13 12 (3.32%) C++ Quantitative Developer
13 12 (3.32%) Linux Developer
13 12 (3.32%) Low Latency C++ Developer
14 11 (3.05%) Data Engineer
14 11 (3.05%) Gen AI Engineer
15 9 (2.49%) Machine Learning Engineer
15 9 (2.49%) Robotics Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 57 (15.79%) TensorFlow
2 54 (14.96%) PyTorch
3 43 (11.91%) Pandas
4 42 (11.63%) scikit-learn
5 37 (10.25%) NumPy
6 18 (4.99%) FIX Protocol
7 15 (4.16%) .NET
8 14 (3.88%) REST
8 14 (3.88%) RESTful
9 13 (3.60%) Kafka
9 13 (3.60%) PySpark
9 13 (3.60%) React
10 11 (3.05%) Matplotlib
10 11 (3.05%) Model Context Protocol
10 11 (3.05%) Seaborn
11 10 (2.77%) FastAPI
12 9 (2.49%) A2A Protocol
12 9 (2.49%) Hugging Face
12 9 (2.49%) Semantic Kernel
12 9 (2.49%) XGBoost
Miscellaneous
1 73 (20.22%) Data Structures
2 29 (8.03%) Equities
3 26 (7.20%) Distributed Systems
4 20 (5.54%) Cloud Native
5 19 (5.26%) Derivative
5 19 (5.26%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
6 15 (4.16%) Robotics
7 14 (3.88%) Fixed Income
8 11 (3.05%) Equity Derivative
9 9 (2.49%) PKI
10 8 (2.22%) Data Protection Act
10 8 (2.22%) Distributed Computing
10 8 (2.22%) Product Ownership
11 7 (1.94%) Clustering
11 7 (1.94%) Mobile App
12 6 (1.66%) Legacy Systems
13 5 (1.39%) FPGA
13 5 (1.39%) Greenfield Project
13 5 (1.39%) IoT
13 5 (1.39%) Onboarding
Operating Systems
1 24 (6.65%) Linux
2 10 (2.77%) Unix
3 4 (1.11%) Android
4 3 (0.83%) Apple iOS
4 3 (0.83%) Windows
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
1 171 (47.37%) Machine Learning
2 114 (31.58%) AI
3 96 (26.59%) Computer Science
3 96 (26.59%) Data Science
4 86 (23.82%) Problem-Solving
5 84 (23.27%) CI/CD
6 74 (20.50%) Software Engineering
7 66 (18.28%) Analytics
8 62 (17.17%) Agile
9 58 (16.07%) Data Pipeline
9 58 (16.07%) LLM
10 57 (15.79%) Mathematics
11 53 (14.68%) Data Engineering
11 53 (14.68%) Statistics
12 44 (12.19%) Containerisation
12 44 (12.19%) Data Analysis
13 42 (11.63%) Visualisation
14 40 (11.08%) Natural Language Processing
14 40 (11.08%) Test Automation
15 38 (10.53%) Generative AI
Programming Languages
1 204 (56.51%) Python
2 73 (20.22%) SQL
3 54 (14.96%) Java
4 37 (10.25%) C++
5 26 (7.20%) MATLAB
6 24 (6.65%) C#
7 18 (4.99%) R
7 18 (4.99%) TypeScript
8 16 (4.43%) Ada
9 13 (3.60%) PowerShell
10 12 (3.32%) JavaScript
11 11 (3.05%) Kotlin
12 10 (2.77%) Bash
13 9 (2.49%) Go
14 5 (1.39%) C
15 4 (1.11%) Rust
15 4 (1.11%) SystemVerilog
15 4 (1.11%) Tcl
16 3 (0.83%) SPARQL
17 2 (0.55%) Scala
Qualifications
1 93 (25.76%) Degree
2 47 (13.02%) Security Cleared
3 28 (7.76%) Master's Degree
4 26 (7.20%) Computer Science Degree
5 25 (6.93%) SC Cleared
6 15 (4.16%) PhD
7 13 (3.60%) Numerate Degree
8 10 (2.77%) Microsoft Certified Professional
9 7 (1.94%) DBS Check
10 6 (1.66%) BPSS Clearance
10 6 (1.66%) DV Cleared
11 4 (1.11%) CISM
11 4 (1.11%) CISSP
11 4 (1.11%) GIAC
11 4 (1.11%) HNC
11 4 (1.11%) HND
12 3 (0.83%) Cisco Certification
13 2 (0.55%) CCDP
13 2 (0.55%) CCIE
13 2 (0.55%) CESG Certified Professional
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 15 (4.16%) QA
2 11 (3.05%) NIST
3 9 (2.49%) Data Quality
4 8 (2.22%) EU AI Act
5 7 (1.94%) Accessibility
6 4 (1.11%) Actionable Recommendations
6 4 (1.11%) DO-254
6 4 (1.11%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 3 (0.83%) SLA
8 2 (0.55%) JSP 440
8 2 (0.55%) NCSC
8 2 (0.55%) PCI DSS
8 2 (0.55%) RMADS
9 1 (0.28%) Disclosure Scotland
9 1 (0.28%) GDPR
System Software
1 45 (12.47%) Docker
2 8 (2.22%) Firmware
3 1 (0.28%) Active Directory
3 1 (0.28%) Oracle RAC
3 1 (0.28%) Squid
Systems Management
1 27 (7.48%) Kubernetes
2 21 (5.82%) Terraform
3 8 (2.22%) Grafana
4 3 (0.83%) Ansible
4 3 (0.83%) Single Sign-On
5 2 (0.55%) Kibana
5 2 (0.55%) Kubeflow
5 2 (0.55%) logstash
5 2 (0.55%) Prometheus
5 2 (0.55%) rkt
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 29 (8.03%) Microsoft
2 23 (6.37%) Databricks
3 12 (3.32%) Google
4 10 (2.77%) Foundry
4 10 (2.77%) IBM
5 6 (1.66%) MathWorks
5 6 (1.66%) Solace
5 6 (1.66%) Thales
6 5 (1.39%) Oracle
7 4 (1.11%) Actel
7 4 (1.11%) Altera
7 4 (1.11%) AppDynamics
7 4 (1.11%) Bloomberg
7 4 (1.11%) Charles River
7 4 (1.11%) Intel
7 4 (1.11%) ION Trading
7 4 (1.11%) Microsemi
7 4 (1.11%) OpenAI
7 4 (1.11%) Splunk
7 4 (1.11%) Xilinx