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

6 months to
20 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 289 261 273
Rank change year-on-year -28 +12 +28
Contract jobs citing Algorithms 366 299 370
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.90% 0.97% 0.83%
As % of the Miscellaneous category 2.66% 2.92% 2.74%
Number of daily rates quoted 205 163 241
10th Percentile £341 £376 £400
25th Percentile £432 £450 £481
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £600 £588
Median % change year-on-year -8.33% +2.13% -16.07%
75th Percentile £738 £676 £719
90th Percentile £1,050 £835 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £508 £550 £575
% change year-on-year -7.73% -4.35% -14.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 36 17 44
10th Percentile £48.00 £24.30 £37.24
25th Percentile £53.53 £30.00 £51.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £45.00 £55.00
Median % change year-on-year +44.44% -18.18% -3.27%
75th Percentile - £65.00 £58.75
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 13,734 10,245 13,519
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 33.63% 33.21% 30.45%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,648 6,187 8,701
10th Percentile £275 £267 £258
25th Percentile £405 £406 £411
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 £753
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £495 £500
% change year-on-year -4.04% -1.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 660 322 825
10th Percentile £15.48 £18.51 £13.00
25th Percentile £18.50 £23.30 £16.54
Median hourly rate £31.83 £32.91 £32.50
Median % change year-on-year -3.28% +1.25% +44.54%
75th Percentile £64.50 £65.00 £58.70
90th Percentile £76.30 £82.48 £70.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £30.30 £32.50 £34.21
% change year-on-year -6.76% -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 20 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 20 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 20 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 -29 306 £575 -5.93% 459
London -1 178 £650 +5.05% 238
UK excluding London -59 148 £508 -7.73% 278
Work from Home -24 95 £638 +21.43% 130
North of England -58 30 £575 +16.16% 44
South West -7 29 £500 -25.09% 45
East of England -20 28 £345 -46.92% 40
South East -23 26 £593 +12.86% 92
Yorkshire -43 23 £675 - 10
Scotland +1 21 £418 -1.76% 16
West Midlands -40 9 £550 +48.65% 17
Midlands -46 9 £550 +48.65% 33
Wales -11 6 £400 -31.57% 12
North West -40 6 £180 -63.64% 25
Northern Ireland -1 1 - - 4
North East -15 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 23 (6.28%) Apache Spark
2 13 (3.55%) Apache
2 13 (3.55%) Apache Airflow
3 12 (3.28%) Jupyter
4 5 (1.37%) Apache Pig
5 2 (0.55%) Confluence
6 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 90 (24.59%) AWS
2 79 (21.58%) Azure
3 28 (7.65%) GCP
3 28 (7.65%) Power Platform
4 26 (7.10%) Serverless
5 23 (6.28%) GitHub
6 20 (5.46%) Amazon SageMaker
7 19 (5.19%) Cloud Computing
8 17 (4.64%) AWS Lambda
9 16 (4.37%) Amazon ECS
10 14 (3.83%) Amazon S3
11 13 (3.55%) Azure AKS
12 12 (3.28%) Amazon EKS
12 12 (3.28%) GitHub Copilot
12 12 (3.28%) PaaS
13 9 (2.46%) Amazon CloudWatch
13 9 (2.46%) Azure Functions
13 9 (2.46%) Dagster
14 8 (2.19%) AWS CloudFormation
14 8 (2.19%) Vertex AI
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%) 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%) LAN
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%) Reverse Proxy
4 2 (0.55%) SD-WAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 26 (7.10%) Power BI
2 23 (6.28%) NoSQL
3 19 (5.19%) Hadoop
4 17 (4.64%) Big Data
5 16 (4.37%) Relational Database
6 14 (3.83%) Tableau
7 13 (3.55%) PostgreSQL
8 12 (3.28%) KDB
8 12 (3.28%) Kdb+
9 7 (1.91%) Data Lake
9 7 (1.91%) Data Warehouse
9 7 (1.91%) RDBMS
10 6 (1.64%) Apache Hive
10 6 (1.64%) Data Mining
11 5 (1.37%) Elasticsearch
11 5 (1.37%) MySQL
12 4 (1.09%) Amazon Athena
12 4 (1.09%) SQL Server
13 3 (0.82%) Delta Lake
13 3 (0.82%) Weaviate
Development Applications
1 35 (9.56%) Git
2 13 (3.55%) MLflow
3 10 (2.73%) Jenkins
4 7 (1.91%) GitLab
5 5 (1.37%) Maven
5 5 (1.37%) PyCharm
6 4 (1.09%) Gradle
6 4 (1.09%) JUnit
7 3 (0.82%) QUnit
7 3 (0.82%) Visual Studio
8 2 (0.55%) Cypress.io
8 2 (0.55%) Eclipse
8 2 (0.55%) GoCD
8 2 (0.55%) IntelliJ
8 2 (0.55%) JIRA
8 2 (0.55%) Log4j
8 2 (0.55%) SonarQube
8 2 (0.55%) Sonatype Nexus
8 2 (0.55%) Subversion
8 2 (0.55%) TeamCity
General
1 103 (28.14%) Social Skills
2 64 (17.49%) Finance
3 57 (15.57%) Analytical Skills
4 40 (10.93%) Front Office
5 34 (9.29%) Banking
6 21 (5.74%) Public Sector
7 9 (2.46%) Investment Banking
7 9 (2.46%) Retail
8 7 (1.91%) Electronics
9 6 (1.64%) Aerospace
9 6 (1.64%) Manufacturing
9 6 (1.64%) Marketing
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
1 106 (28.96%) Developer
2 60 (16.39%) Senior
3 49 (13.39%) Data Scientist
4 40 (10.93%) Software Engineer
5 27 (7.38%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
5 27 (7.38%) Lead
6 24 (6.56%) Python Developer
6 24 (6.56%) Senior Developer
7 21 (5.74%) Java Developer
7 21 (5.74%) Quantitative Developer
8 20 (5.46%) C++ Developer
9 19 (5.19%) Algorithm Engineer
10 18 (4.92%) Architect
11 16 (4.37%) 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%) Machine Learning Engineer
14 9 (2.46%) Robotics Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 54 (14.75%) PyTorch
2 53 (14.48%) TensorFlow
3 40 (10.93%) Pandas
4 38 (10.38%) scikit-learn
5 35 (9.56%) NumPy
6 22 (6.01%) FIX Protocol
7 18 (4.92%) .NET
8 17 (4.64%) RESTful
9 15 (4.10%) Model Context Protocol
9 15 (4.10%) React
10 14 (3.83%) REST
11 13 (3.55%) A2A Protocol
11 13 (3.55%) Kafka
11 13 (3.55%) PySpark
11 13 (3.55%) Semantic Kernel
12 11 (3.01%) Matplotlib
13 10 (2.73%) FastAPI
13 10 (2.73%) SQLAlchemy
14 9 (2.46%) Hugging Face
14 9 (2.46%) Seaborn
Miscellaneous
1 77 (21.04%) Data Structures
2 29 (7.92%) Equities
3 25 (6.83%) Cloud Native
3 25 (6.83%) Distributed Systems
3 25 (6.83%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
4 20 (5.46%) Derivative
5 18 (4.92%) Fixed Income
6 13 (3.55%) Robotics
7 11 (3.01%) Data Protection Act
7 11 (3.01%) Equity Derivative
7 11 (3.01%) FPGA
7 11 (3.01%) Product Ownership
8 9 (2.46%) Distributed Computing
8 9 (2.46%) PKI
9 8 (2.19%) Clustering
10 7 (1.91%) Legacy Systems
11 6 (1.64%) Onboarding
11 6 (1.64%) VHDL
12 5 (1.37%) Greenfield Project
12 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
1 180 (49.18%) Machine Learning
2 113 (30.87%) AI
3 106 (28.96%) Data Science
4 96 (26.23%) Problem-Solving
5 89 (24.32%) Computer Science
6 77 (21.04%) CI/CD
7 74 (20.22%) Agile
8 72 (19.67%) Software Engineering
9 64 (17.49%) Analytics
10 60 (16.39%) LLM
11 59 (16.12%) Data Pipeline
11 59 (16.12%) Mathematics
12 49 (13.39%) Statistics
13 47 (12.84%) Data Engineering
14 46 (12.57%) Visualisation
15 45 (12.30%) Deep Learning
16 43 (11.75%) Data Analysis
17 42 (11.48%) Containerisation
17 42 (11.48%) Test Automation
18 39 (10.66%) Natural Language Processing
Programming Languages
1 205 (56.01%) Python
2 73 (19.95%) SQL
3 66 (18.03%) Java
4 38 (10.38%) C++
5 30 (8.20%) MATLAB
6 23 (6.28%) C#
7 17 (4.64%) TypeScript
8 14 (3.83%) PowerShell
8 14 (3.83%) R
9 13 (3.55%) Ada
10 12 (3.28%) JavaScript
11 11 (3.01%) Bash
12 8 (2.19%) Go
12 8 (2.19%) Kotlin
13 7 (1.91%) Scala
14 5 (1.37%) C
14 5 (1.37%) SystemVerilog
14 5 (1.37%) Tcl
15 2 (0.55%) Data Analysis Expressions
15 2 (0.55%) Rust
Qualifications
1 85 (23.22%) Degree
2 50 (13.66%) Security Cleared
3 32 (8.74%) SC Cleared
4 26 (7.10%) Master's Degree
5 24 (6.56%) Computer Science Degree
6 16 (4.37%) 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%) CCDP
13 2 (0.55%) CCIE
13 2 (0.55%) FFIEC
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 38 (10.38%) 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 17 (4.64%) Databricks
3 14 (3.83%) Foundry
4 12 (3.28%) Google
4 12 (3.28%) Splunk
5 10 (2.73%) Xilinx
6 9 (2.46%) IBM
7 6 (1.64%) Thales
8 5 (1.37%) Actel
8 5 (1.37%) Altera
8 5 (1.37%) Intel
8 5 (1.37%) MathWorks
8 5 (1.37%) Microsemi
8 5 (1.37%) Oracle
8 5 (1.37%) SAP
8 5 (1.37%) Solace
9 4 (1.09%) AppDynamics
9 4 (1.09%) Bloomberg
9 4 (1.09%) ION Trading
9 4 (1.09%) TIBCO