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

6 months to
27 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 285 271 272
Rank change year-on-year -14 +1 +28
Contract jobs citing Algorithms 366 303 371
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.88% 0.99% 0.84%
As % of the Miscellaneous category 2.63% 2.97% 2.76%
Number of daily rates quoted 206 167 244
10th Percentile £335 £374 £402
25th Percentile £427 £450 £480
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £595 £581
Median % change year-on-year -7.56% +2.37% -13.89%
75th Percentile £738 £676 £719
90th Percentile £1,050 £810 £861
UK excluding London median daily rate £508 £550 £561
% change year-on-year -7.73% -2.00% -8.37%
Number of hourly rates quoted 37 18 44
10th Percentile £48.40 £22.72 £41.63
25th Percentile £53.53 £27.19 £51.38
Median hourly rate £65.00 £45.00 £55.00
Median % change year-on-year +44.44% -18.18% -
75th Percentile - £63.44 £58.75
90th Percentile £70.20 £75.00 £67.10
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £42.50 £55.00
% change year-on-year +52.94% -22.73% -

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 13,910 10,189 13,423
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 33.49% 33.26% 30.41%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,782 6,203 8,638
10th Percentile £280 £275 £258
25th Percentile £406 £408 £413
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 £763 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £495 £500
% change year-on-year -4.04% -1.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 654 329 822
10th Percentile £15.38 £18.51 £13.00
25th Percentile £18.50 £23.30 £16.25
Median hourly rate £32.75 £32.81 £30.58
Median % change year-on-year -0.18% +7.29% +36.00%
75th Percentile £65.00 £65.00 £57.50
90th Percentile £78.38 £82.64 £70.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £32.00 £32.50 £32.12
% change year-on-year -1.54% +1.20% +45.98%

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 27 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 27 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 27 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 -13 306 £565 -7.30% 263
London -1 176 £625 +1.01% 93
UK excluding London -60 149 £508 -7.73% 216
Work from Home -18 95 £625 +19.05% 82
South West -14 30 £500 -25.09% 32
East of England -23 29 £345 -46.92% 36
North of England -61 29 £575 +15.58% 34
South East -25 26 £593 +15.61% 69
Yorkshire -46 22 £675 - 9
Scotland +11 20 £418 -1.76% 15
West Midlands -39 10 £538 +45.27% 12
Midlands -46 10 £538 +159.04% 27
Wales -13 6 £400 -31.57% 7
North West -44 6 £180 -63.64% 19
Northern Ireland -5 1 - - 3
North East -16 1 £400 -36.00% 6

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 (6.01%) Apache Spark
2 14 (3.83%) Apache Airflow
3 12 (3.28%) Apache
4 11 (3.01%) Jupyter
5 3 (0.82%) Apache Pig
6 2 (0.55%) Confluence
7 1 (0.27%) Palantir Foundry
Applications
1 17 (4.64%) Microsoft Excel
2 8 (2.19%) Chatbot
3 6 (1.64%) Microsoft Office
3 6 (1.64%) Simulink
4 5 (1.37%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 3 (0.82%) LaTeX
6 1 (0.27%) CPLEX
Business Applications
1 4 (1.09%) Bloomberg AIM
1 4 (1.09%) Fidessa
2 3 (0.82%) ProductWriter
3 1 (0.27%) Actimize
3 1 (0.27%) SAP IBP
Cloud Services
1 92 (25.14%) AWS
2 81 (22.13%) Azure
3 30 (8.20%) GCP
4 26 (7.10%) Power Platform
4 26 (7.10%) Serverless
5 23 (6.28%) GitHub
6 20 (5.46%) Amazon SageMaker
6 20 (5.46%) Cloud Computing
7 17 (4.64%) AWS Lambda
8 16 (4.37%) Amazon ECS
9 14 (3.83%) Amazon S3
10 13 (3.55%) Azure AKS
11 12 (3.28%) Amazon EKS
11 12 (3.28%) GitHub Copilot
11 12 (3.28%) PaaS
12 10 (2.73%) Dagster
13 9 (2.46%) Amazon CloudWatch
13 9 (2.46%) Azure Functions
14 8 (2.19%) AWS CloudFormation
14 8 (2.19%) Snowflake
Communications & Networking
1 5 (1.37%) Ethernet
1 5 (1.37%) VPN
2 4 (1.09%) HTTP
2 4 (1.09%) Internet
2 4 (1.09%) S/MIME
3 3 (0.82%) Network Security
4 2 (0.55%) 2G
4 2 (0.55%) 5G
4 2 (0.55%) BGP
4 2 (0.55%) BIG-IP
4 2 (0.55%) Ethernet VPN
4 2 (0.55%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
4 2 (0.55%) Firewall
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%) OSPF
4 2 (0.55%) SD-WAN
4 2 (0.55%) VXLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 24 (6.56%) Power BI
2 22 (6.01%) NoSQL
3 17 (4.64%) Hadoop
4 16 (4.37%) Big Data
4 16 (4.37%) Relational Database
5 14 (3.83%) Tableau
6 13 (3.55%) PostgreSQL
7 11 (3.01%) KDB
7 11 (3.01%) Kdb+
8 7 (1.91%) Data Lake
8 7 (1.91%) Data Warehouse
8 7 (1.91%) RDBMS
9 5 (1.37%) Data Mining
9 5 (1.37%) MySQL
10 4 (1.09%) Amazon Athena
10 4 (1.09%) Apache Hive
10 4 (1.09%) Elasticsearch
10 4 (1.09%) SQL Server
11 3 (0.82%) Delta Lake
11 3 (0.82%) Weaviate
Development Applications
1 38 (10.38%) Git
2 13 (3.55%) MLflow
3 10 (2.73%) Jenkins
4 7 (1.91%) GitLab
5 5 (1.37%) PyCharm
6 4 (1.09%) Gradle
6 4 (1.09%) JUnit
6 4 (1.09%) Maven
7 3 (0.82%) QUnit
7 3 (0.82%) Visual Studio
8 2 (0.55%) Cypress.io
8 2 (0.55%) GoCD
8 2 (0.55%) JIRA
8 2 (0.55%) Log4j
8 2 (0.55%) Mockito
8 2 (0.55%) SonarQube
8 2 (0.55%) Sonatype Nexus
8 2 (0.55%) Subversion
8 2 (0.55%) TeamCity
9 1 (0.27%) SoapUI
General
1 103 (28.14%) Social Skills
2 64 (17.49%) Finance
3 58 (15.85%) Analytical Skills
4 38 (10.38%) Front Office
5 35 (9.56%) Banking
6 21 (5.74%) Public Sector
7 9 (2.46%) Investment Banking
7 9 (2.46%) Retail
8 7 (1.91%) Aerospace
8 7 (1.91%) Electronics
8 7 (1.91%) Marketing
9 6 (1.64%) Manufacturing
9 6 (1.64%) Telecoms
10 5 (1.37%) Games
10 5 (1.37%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 5 (1.37%) Influencing Skills
10 5 (1.37%) Presentation Skills
11 4 (1.09%) Documentation Skills
11 4 (1.09%) Police
11 4 (1.09%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 109 (29.78%) Developer
2 61 (16.67%) Senior
3 48 (13.11%) Data Scientist
4 41 (11.20%) Software Engineer
5 28 (7.65%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
6 27 (7.38%) Lead
7 24 (6.56%) Python Developer
7 24 (6.56%) Senior Developer
8 21 (5.74%) Java Developer
8 21 (5.74%) Quantitative Developer
9 20 (5.46%) Algorithm Engineer
9 20 (5.46%) C++ Developer
10 18 (4.92%) Architect
11 14 (3.83%) Data Engineer
12 12 (3.28%) C++ Quantitative Developer
12 12 (3.28%) Linux Developer
12 12 (3.28%) Low Latency C++ Developer
13 10 (2.73%) Analyst
13 10 (2.73%) Gen AI Engineer
14 9 (2.46%) Machine Learning Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 59 (16.12%) PyTorch
2 58 (15.85%) TensorFlow
3 40 (10.93%) Pandas
4 38 (10.38%) scikit-learn
5 35 (9.56%) NumPy
6 20 (5.46%) FIX Protocol
7 18 (4.92%) .NET
8 17 (4.64%) RESTful
9 16 (4.37%) REST
10 15 (4.10%) Model Context Protocol
10 15 (4.10%) React
11 13 (3.55%) A2A Protocol
11 13 (3.55%) Kafka
11 13 (3.55%) PySpark
11 13 (3.55%) Semantic Kernel
12 12 (3.28%) Hugging Face
13 10 (2.73%) FastAPI
13 10 (2.73%) Matplotlib
13 10 (2.73%) SQLAlchemy
14 9 (2.46%) Seaborn
Miscellaneous
1 76 (20.77%) Data Structures
2 29 (7.92%) Equities
3 24 (6.56%) Cloud Native
3 24 (6.56%) Distributed Systems
3 24 (6.56%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
4 20 (5.46%) Derivative
5 17 (4.64%) Fixed Income
6 13 (3.55%) Robotics
7 12 (3.28%) Product Ownership
8 11 (3.01%) Equity Derivative
9 10 (2.73%) Data Protection Act
10 9 (2.46%) Distributed Computing
10 9 (2.46%) FPGA
10 9 (2.46%) PKI
11 8 (2.19%) Clustering
12 7 (1.91%) Legacy Systems
13 6 (1.64%) Mobile App
13 6 (1.64%) Onboarding
14 5 (1.37%) Greenfield Project
14 5 (1.37%) Verilog
Operating Systems
1 26 (7.10%) Linux
2 11 (3.01%) Unix
3 4 (1.09%) Android
3 4 (1.09%) Windows
4 3 (0.82%) Apple iOS
5 2 (0.55%) 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
1 182 (49.73%) Machine Learning
2 116 (31.69%) AI
3 104 (28.42%) Data Science
4 99 (27.05%) Problem-Solving
5 89 (24.32%) Computer Science
6 80 (21.86%) CI/CD
7 73 (19.95%) Software Engineering
8 72 (19.67%) Agile
9 65 (17.76%) Analytics
10 64 (17.49%) LLM
11 60 (16.39%) Data Pipeline
12 59 (16.12%) Mathematics
13 49 (13.39%) Statistics
14 48 (13.11%) Data Engineering
15 44 (12.02%) Deep Learning
15 44 (12.02%) Visualisation
16 43 (11.75%) Containerisation
16 43 (11.75%) Test Automation
17 42 (11.48%) Data Analysis
18 38 (10.38%) Natural Language Processing
Programming Languages
1 207 (56.56%) Python
2 72 (19.67%) SQL
3 64 (17.49%) Java
4 38 (10.38%) C++
5 29 (7.92%) MATLAB
6 23 (6.28%) C#
7 17 (4.64%) TypeScript
8 15 (4.10%) R
9 14 (3.83%) Ada
9 14 (3.83%) PowerShell
10 12 (3.28%) JavaScript
11 11 (3.01%) Bash
12 10 (2.73%) Kotlin
13 8 (2.19%) Go
14 6 (1.64%) Scala
15 5 (1.37%) C
15 5 (1.37%) SystemVerilog
15 5 (1.37%) Tcl
16 2 (0.55%) Rust
16 2 (0.55%) SPARQL
Qualifications
1 87 (23.77%) Degree
2 49 (13.39%) Security Cleared
3 30 (8.20%) SC Cleared
4 26 (7.10%) Master's Degree
5 24 (6.56%) Computer Science Degree
6 17 (4.64%) PhD
7 14 (3.83%) Microsoft Certified Professional
8 12 (3.28%) Numerate Degree
9 6 (1.64%) DV Cleared
10 5 (1.37%) BPSS Clearance
10 5 (1.37%) GIAC
10 5 (1.37%) HNC
10 5 (1.37%) HND
11 4 (1.09%) CISM
11 4 (1.09%) CISSP
12 3 (0.82%) Cisco Certification
12 3 (0.82%) DBS Check
13 2 (0.55%) CESG Certified Professional
13 2 (0.55%) CHECK Team Leader
13 2 (0.55%) CREST Certified
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 15 (4.10%) NIST
1 15 (4.10%) QA
2 12 (3.28%) EU AI Act
3 10 (2.73%) Data Quality
4 9 (2.46%) Accessibility
5 5 (1.37%) DO-254
6 4 (1.09%) Actionable Recommendations
6 4 (1.09%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 3 (0.82%) SLA
8 2 (0.55%) Disclosure Scotland
8 2 (0.55%) JSP 440
8 2 (0.55%) NCSC
8 2 (0.55%) PCI DSS
8 2 (0.55%) RMADS
9 1 (0.27%) EMIR
9 1 (0.27%) GDPR
System Software
1 43 (11.75%) Docker
2 9 (2.46%) Firmware
3 1 (0.27%) Active Directory
3 1 (0.27%) Oracle RAC
3 1 (0.27%) Squid
Systems Management
1 34 (9.29%) Kubernetes
2 21 (5.74%) Terraform
3 10 (2.73%) Grafana
4 4 (1.09%) Ansible
5 3 (0.82%) Kibana
5 3 (0.82%) logstash
5 3 (0.82%) Single Sign-On
6 2 (0.55%) ITRS Geneos
6 2 (0.55%) Prometheus
6 2 (0.55%) rkt
7 1 (0.27%) Data Guard
7 1 (0.27%) HP Fortify
7 1 (0.27%) Kubeflow
7 1 (0.27%) Oracle ZFS
Vendors
1 33 (9.02%) Microsoft
2 19 (5.19%) Databricks
3 14 (3.83%) Foundry
4 12 (3.28%) Google
5 10 (2.73%) Splunk
6 9 (2.46%) IBM
7 8 (2.19%) Xilinx
8 6 (1.64%) Thales
9 5 (1.37%) Actel
9 5 (1.37%) Altera
9 5 (1.37%) Intel
9 5 (1.37%) MathWorks
9 5 (1.37%) Microsemi
9 5 (1.37%) Oracle
9 5 (1.37%) SAP
9 5 (1.37%) Solace
10 4 (1.09%) AppDynamics
10 4 (1.09%) Bloomberg
10 4 (1.09%) ION Trading
10 4 (1.09%) TIBCO