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 21 May 2026, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
21 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 322 265 271
Rank change year-on-year -57 +6 +7
Contract jobs citing Algorithms 339 288 361
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.70% 0.99% 0.85%
As % of the Miscellaneous category 2.20% 2.91% 2.79%
Number of daily rates quoted 181 163 229
10th Percentile £198 £413 £400
25th Percentile £432 £500 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £625 £588
Median % change year-on-year -12.00% +6.38% -2.08%
75th Percentile £725 £714 £738
90th Percentile £863 £850 £875
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £550 £508
% change year-on-year -9.09% +8.37% -4.25%
Number of hourly rates quoted 54 25 55
10th Percentile £53.53 £22.72 £33.56
25th Percentile £63.13 £30.00 £47.38
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £55.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% - +150.00%
75th Percentile £69.38 £73.75 £58.75
90th Percentile £85.83 £79.48 £65.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £61.50 £55.00
% change year-on-year +5.69% +11.82% +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 15,414 9,893 12,931
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 31.95% 33.99% 30.40%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,564 6,299 8,335
10th Percentile £313 £300 £268
25th Percentile £413 £409 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £525 £540
Median % change year-on-year -2.38% -2.78% -1.82%
75th Percentile £625 £650 £663
90th Percentile £743 £775 £800
UK excluding London median daily rate £485 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +2.11% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 729 396 900
10th Percentile £16.00 £16.24 £12.25
25th Percentile £19.64 £20.45 £15.17
Median hourly rate £41.94 £31.76 £31.50
Median % change year-on-year +32.05% +0.83% +41.51%
75th Percentile £70.00 £63.75 £61.30
90th Percentile £85.40 £82.85 £70.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £46.00 £30.39 £30.00
% change year-on-year +51.37% +1.30% +36.36%

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 21 May 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 21 May 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 21 May 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 -44 288 £550 -15.38% 341
London -34 155 £650 -0.04% 117
UK excluding London -79 145 £500 -9.09% 260
Work from Home -32 96 £625 +19.05% 180
South West +4 49 £500 -25.09% 44
South East -40 38 £550 +10.00% 77
East of England -35 19 £215 -66.92% 64
North of England -73 15 £215 -63.74% 37
Scotland -11 11 £675 +58.82% 14
Yorkshire -43 10 £215 - 12
West Midlands -52 6 £463 - 10
Midlands -54 6 £463 +560.71% 25
Wales -15 5 £475 -17.39% 2
North West -50 5 £355 -36.89% 19
Northern Ireland -3 2 - - 3

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 17 (5.01%) Apache Airflow
2 16 (4.72%) Apache Spark
3 7 (2.06%) Apache
4 6 (1.77%) Jupyter
5 1 (0.29%) Confluence
5 1 (0.29%) Ethereum
5 1 (0.29%) Palantir Foundry
5 1 (0.29%) Solana
Applications
1 12 (3.54%) Microsoft Excel
2 6 (1.77%) CPLEX
3 5 (1.47%) Microsoft Office
4 4 (1.18%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 3 (0.88%) LaTeX
5 3 (0.88%) Simulink
6 1 (0.29%) Chatbot
Business Applications
1 11 (3.24%) SAP IBP
2 7 (2.06%) ProductWriter
3 3 (0.88%) Bloomberg AIM
3 3 (0.88%) Fidessa
4 1 (0.29%) SAP APO
Cloud Services
1 62 (18.29%) AWS
2 48 (14.16%) Azure
3 26 (7.67%) GCP
4 13 (3.83%) Amazon ECS
4 13 (3.83%) Dagster
5 11 (3.24%) AWS Lambda
5 11 (3.24%) Serverless
6 10 (2.95%) Amazon SageMaker
6 10 (2.95%) Power Platform
7 9 (2.65%) Amazon CloudWatch
7 9 (2.65%) Amazon EKS
7 9 (2.65%) Cloud Computing
8 8 (2.36%) GitHub
9 7 (2.06%) Amazon S3
9 7 (2.06%) GitHub Actions
10 6 (1.77%) Vertex AI
11 5 (1.47%) Azure DevOps
11 5 (1.47%) Snowflake
12 4 (1.18%) Amazon SQS
13 3 (0.88%) SaaS
Communications & Networking
1 14 (4.13%) HTTP
2 6 (1.77%) Multicast
3 5 (1.47%) BIG-IP
3 5 (1.47%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
3 5 (1.47%) Firewall
3 5 (1.47%) Network Security
3 5 (1.47%) SSL
4 4 (1.18%) S/MIME
4 4 (1.18%) VPN
5 3 (0.88%) DNS
5 3 (0.88%) Ethernet
5 3 (0.88%) HTTPS
5 3 (0.88%) TCP/IP
6 2 (0.59%) BGP
6 2 (0.59%) IPsec
6 2 (0.59%) LAN
6 2 (0.59%) MPLS
6 2 (0.59%) OSPF
6 2 (0.59%) Reverse Proxy
6 2 (0.59%) WAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 16 (4.72%) Big Data
2 13 (3.83%) Hadoop
3 11 (3.24%) NoSQL
4 10 (2.95%) PostgreSQL
4 10 (2.95%) Power BI
5 8 (2.36%) KDB
5 8 (2.36%) Tableau
6 7 (2.06%) SQL Server
7 6 (1.77%) MongoDB
7 6 (1.77%) Relational Database
8 4 (1.18%) Neo4j
9 3 (0.88%) Data Lake
9 3 (0.88%) Kdb+
9 3 (0.88%) Pinecone
9 3 (0.88%) TigerGraph
9 3 (0.88%) Weaviate
10 2 (0.59%) Amazon Athena
10 2 (0.59%) Data Warehouse
10 2 (0.59%) Spark SQL
11 1 (0.29%) Data Mining
Development Applications
1 31 (9.14%) Git
2 12 (3.54%) GitLab
3 11 (3.24%) MLflow
4 3 (0.88%) Visual Studio
5 2 (0.59%) Gradle
5 2 (0.59%) JUnit
5 2 (0.59%) Maven
5 2 (0.59%) TeamCity
6 1 (0.29%) Ant
6 1 (0.29%) Cypress.io
6 1 (0.29%) Eclipse
6 1 (0.29%) Hardhat
6 1 (0.29%) IntelliJ
6 1 (0.29%) Jenkins
6 1 (0.29%) JIRA
6 1 (0.29%) JMeter
6 1 (0.29%) Octopus Deploy
6 1 (0.29%) Oracle Forms
6 1 (0.29%) Selenium
6 1 (0.29%) SoapUI
General
1 65 (19.17%) Social Skills
2 58 (17.11%) Analytical Skills
3 45 (13.27%) Finance
4 33 (9.73%) Banking
5 23 (6.78%) Front Office
6 18 (5.31%) Investment Banking
7 15 (4.42%) Public Sector
8 9 (2.65%) Aerospace
9 6 (1.77%) Aviation
10 5 (1.47%) Electronics
10 5 (1.47%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 5 (1.47%) Law
10 5 (1.47%) Telecoms
11 4 (1.18%) Financial Institution
11 4 (1.18%) Police
11 4 (1.18%) Presentation Skills
12 3 (0.88%) Documentation Skills
12 3 (0.88%) Games
12 3 (0.88%) Marketing
12 3 (0.88%) Retail
Job Titles
1 85 (25.07%) Developer
2 62 (18.29%) Software Engineer
3 57 (16.81%) Senior
4 38 (11.21%) Data Scientist
5 33 (9.73%) Algorithm Engineer
6 26 (7.67%) Python Developer
7 19 (5.60%) Architect
7 19 (5.60%) Java Developer
8 16 (4.72%) Senior Developer
9 15 (4.42%) C++ Developer
9 15 (4.42%) C++ Software Engineer
10 14 (4.13%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
10 14 (4.13%) Consultant
11 11 (3.24%) Quantitative Developer
11 11 (3.24%) Senior Software Engineer
12 10 (2.95%) Lead
12 10 (2.95%) SAP Consultant
13 8 (2.36%) Full-Stack Engineer
13 8 (2.36%) Solutions Architect
14 7 (2.06%) Data Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 34 (10.03%) PyTorch
2 30 (8.85%) Pandas
3 28 (8.26%) TensorFlow
4 26 (7.67%) NumPy
4 26 (7.67%) scikit-learn
5 23 (6.78%) FIX Protocol
6 14 (4.13%) Kafka
6 14 (4.13%) React
7 12 (3.54%) REST
8 11 (3.24%) FastAPI
8 11 (3.24%) Hugging Face
8 11 (3.24%) PySpark
9 10 (2.95%) Spring
9 10 (2.95%) Spring Boot
10 9 (2.65%) Seaborn
11 7 (2.06%) .NET
11 7 (2.06%) LangChain
11 7 (2.06%) Matplotlib
11 7 (2.06%) RESTful
11 7 (2.06%) WebSockets
Miscellaneous
1 60 (17.70%) Data Structures
2 37 (10.91%) Distributed Systems
3 24 (7.08%) Equities
4 21 (6.19%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
5 20 (5.90%) Derivative
6 14 (4.13%) Robotics
7 11 (3.24%) Cloud Native
7 11 (3.24%) Product Ownership
8 10 (2.95%) PKI
9 9 (2.65%) AI Agents
10 8 (2.36%) Data Protection Act
11 7 (2.06%) Equity Derivative
11 7 (2.06%) Fixed Income
11 7 (2.06%) Legacy Systems
12 5 (1.47%) IoT
13 4 (1.18%) Distributed Denial-of-Service
13 4 (1.18%) FPGA
13 4 (1.18%) Self-Motivation
13 4 (1.18%) Smartcard
14 3 (0.88%) Hybrid Cloud
Operating Systems
1 11 (3.24%) Linux
2 2 (0.59%) Unix
3 1 (0.29%) Android
3 1 (0.29%) Embedded Linux
3 1 (0.29%) Solaris
3 1 (0.29%) VMS
3 1 (0.29%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 125 (36.87%) Machine Learning
2 92 (27.14%) Software Engineering
3 87 (25.66%) AI
4 78 (23.01%) CI/CD
5 71 (20.94%) Computer Science
6 67 (19.76%) Data Science
7 60 (17.70%) Problem-Solving
8 53 (15.63%) Analytics
9 47 (13.86%) Mathematics
10 39 (11.50%) Containerisation
11 38 (11.21%) Multithreading
12 37 (10.91%) Data Pipeline
12 37 (10.91%) Low Latency
13 36 (10.62%) LLM
14 33 (9.73%) Statistics
15 31 (9.14%) Data Analysis
16 30 (8.85%) Agile
17 28 (8.26%) Workflow
18 27 (7.96%) Microservices
18 27 (7.96%) Visualisation
Programming Languages
1 152 (44.84%) Python
2 61 (17.99%) Java
3 59 (17.40%) SQL
4 43 (12.68%) C++
5 33 (9.73%) C#
6 30 (8.85%) MATLAB
7 21 (6.19%) Ada
8 19 (5.60%) TypeScript
9 15 (4.42%) R
10 11 (3.24%) Kotlin
10 11 (3.24%) PowerShell
11 9 (2.65%) C
11 9 (2.65%) Rust
12 8 (2.36%) JavaScript
13 6 (1.77%) Go
14 4 (1.18%) Bash
15 3 (0.88%) SPARQL
15 3 (0.88%) SystemVerilog
15 3 (0.88%) Tcl
16 2 (0.59%) Scala
Qualifications
1 63 (18.58%) Degree
2 44 (12.98%) Security Cleared
3 25 (7.37%) SC Cleared
4 19 (5.60%) Master's Degree
5 16 (4.72%) Computer Science Degree
6 15 (4.42%) BPSS Clearance
7 12 (3.54%) PhD
8 9 (2.65%) Numerate Degree
9 6 (1.77%) DBS Check
9 6 (1.77%) DV Cleared
10 5 (1.47%) CISSP
11 4 (1.18%) CISM
11 4 (1.18%) GIAC
12 3 (0.88%) Cisco Certification
12 3 (0.88%) HNC
12 3 (0.88%) HND
13 2 (0.59%) CCDP
13 2 (0.59%) CCIE
13 2 (0.59%) CESG Certified Professional
13 2 (0.59%) CHECK Team Leader
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 10 (2.95%) Data Quality
2 9 (2.65%) Accessibility
3 8 (2.36%) QA
4 5 (1.47%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 5 (1.47%) NIST
5 4 (1.18%) Actionable Recommendations
6 3 (0.88%) Disclosure Scotland
6 3 (0.88%) DO-254
6 3 (0.88%) PCI DSS
6 3 (0.88%) SLA
7 2 (0.59%) JSP 440
7 2 (0.59%) NCSC
7 2 (0.59%) RMADS
8 1 (0.29%) GDPR
System Software
1 40 (11.80%) Docker
2 7 (2.06%) Firmware
3 1 (0.29%) Active Directory
3 1 (0.29%) Oracle RAC
3 1 (0.29%) Squid
Systems Management
1 22 (6.49%) Kubernetes
2 9 (2.65%) Grafana
3 6 (1.77%) Terraform
4 3 (0.88%) Ansible
4 3 (0.88%) Kubeflow
4 3 (0.88%) Single Sign-On
5 2 (0.59%) Prometheus
6 1 (0.29%) Data Guard
6 1 (0.29%) HP Fortify
6 1 (0.29%) Istio
6 1 (0.29%) Kibana
6 1 (0.29%) logstash
6 1 (0.29%) Oracle ZFS
Vendors
1 18 (5.31%) Databricks
2 17 (5.01%) Microsoft
3 13 (3.83%) IBM
4 11 (3.24%) SAP
5 10 (2.95%) MathWorks
6 9 (2.65%) Google
7 7 (2.06%) Solace
8 6 (1.77%) IFS
8 6 (1.77%) Thales
9 5 (1.47%) F5
9 5 (1.47%) Oracle
10 4 (1.18%) ION Trading
10 4 (1.18%) OpenAI
11 3 (0.88%) Actel
11 3 (0.88%) Altera
11 3 (0.88%) Bloomberg
11 3 (0.88%) Charles River
11 3 (0.88%) Microsemi
11 3 (0.88%) Splunk
11 3 (0.88%) Xilinx