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

6 months to
28 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 309 263 266
Rank change year-on-year -46 +3 +23
Contract jobs citing Algorithms 364 287 369
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.82% 0.99% 0.83%
As % of the Miscellaneous category 2.48% 2.92% 2.75%
Number of daily rates quoted 198 165 224
10th Percentile £335 £388 £413
25th Percentile £448 £458 £488
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £558 £600 £600
Median % change year-on-year -7.08% - -7.69%
75th Percentile £738 £676 £741
90th Percentile £1,050 £833 £875
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £545 £556
% change year-on-year -8.26% -2.02% -3.26%
Number of hourly rates quoted 40 20 58
10th Percentile £50.00 £22.72 £34.54
25th Percentile £53.53 £33.09 £47.63
Median hourly rate £65.00 £48.75 £55.00
Median % change year-on-year +33.33% -11.36% +120.00%
75th Percentile - £74.06 £58.75
90th Percentile £70.00 £79.63 £65.90
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £45.00 £55.00
% change year-on-year +44.44% -18.18% +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 14,671 9,836 13,413
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 33.01% 33.85% 30.33%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,209 6,303 8,577
10th Percentile £300 £292 £258
25th Percentile £410 £409 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £503 £525 £530
Median % change year-on-year -4.29% -0.94% -3.64%
75th Percentile £625 £650 £650
90th Percentile £738 £772 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 689 376 884
10th Percentile £15.70 £16.95 £12.28
25th Percentile £19.25 £22.44 £15.39
Median hourly rate £41.94 £32.50 £27.50
Median % change year-on-year +29.05% +18.18% +22.22%
75th Percentile £69.44 £65.00 £57.50
90th Percentile £85.42 £83.20 £67.46
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.46 £31.76 £25.50
% change year-on-year +43.14% +24.55% +15.91%

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 28 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 28 March 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 28 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 -47 302 £558 -10.80% 407
London -2 171 £625 -3.85% 126
UK excluding London -86 142 £500 -8.26% 335
Work from Home -9 106 £638 +21.43% 115
South West -3 37 £500 -25.09% 56
South East -47 32 £550 +10.00% 101
East of England -25 28 £345 -46.92% 48
North of England -72 21 £500 -8.68% 56
Yorkshire -42 13 £695 - 15
Scotland -6 12 £622 +46.35% 18
North West -54 8 £190 -65.14% 28
Wales -19 6 £475 -18.73% 8
West Midlands -55 4 £538 +58.09% 21
Midlands -75 4 £538 +616.67% 48
Northern Ireland -5 2 - - 10

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 21 (5.77%) Apache Spark
2 17 (4.67%) Apache Airflow
3 11 (3.02%) Apache
3 11 (3.02%) Jupyter
4 2 (0.55%) Confluence
5 1 (0.27%) Ethereum
5 1 (0.27%) Palantir Foundry
5 1 (0.27%) Solana
Applications
1 17 (4.67%) Microsoft Excel
2 7 (1.92%) Chatbot
3 6 (1.65%) Microsoft Office
4 5 (1.37%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 4 (1.10%) CPLEX
5 4 (1.10%) Simulink
6 3 (0.82%) LaTeX
Business Applications
1 6 (1.65%) SAP IBP
2 4 (1.10%) Bloomberg AIM
2 4 (1.10%) Fidessa
3 3 (0.82%) ProductWriter
4 1 (0.27%) Actimize
4 1 (0.27%) SAP APO
Cloud Services
1 79 (21.70%) AWS
2 74 (20.33%) Azure
3 36 (9.89%) GCP
4 23 (6.32%) Cloud Computing
5 22 (6.04%) Power Platform
6 20 (5.49%) GitHub
7 15 (4.12%) Amazon SageMaker
7 15 (4.12%) Serverless
8 14 (3.85%) Amazon ECS
9 11 (3.02%) AWS Lambda
9 11 (3.02%) Dagster
9 11 (3.02%) Snowflake
10 9 (2.47%) Amazon EKS
10 9 (2.47%) Vertex AI
11 8 (2.20%) Azure Machine Learning
11 8 (2.20%) PaaS
12 7 (1.92%) Amazon S3
12 7 (1.92%) Azure AKS
12 7 (1.92%) GitHub Actions
12 7 (1.92%) GitHub Copilot
Communications & Networking
1 5 (1.37%) HTTP
1 5 (1.37%) Network Security
1 5 (1.37%) VPN
2 4 (1.10%) BIG-IP
2 4 (1.10%) Ethernet
2 4 (1.10%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
2 4 (1.10%) Firewall
2 4 (1.10%) Internet
2 4 (1.10%) S/MIME
3 3 (0.82%) Multicast
3 3 (0.82%) SSL
4 2 (0.55%) 2G
4 2 (0.55%) 5G
4 2 (0.55%) BGP
4 2 (0.55%) IPsec
4 2 (0.55%) LTE
4 2 (0.55%) MPLS
4 2 (0.55%) OSPF
4 2 (0.55%) Reverse Proxy
4 2 (0.55%) VXLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 20 (5.49%) Big Data
1 20 (5.49%) NoSQL
1 20 (5.49%) Power BI
2 16 (4.40%) Relational Database
2 16 (4.40%) Tableau
3 14 (3.85%) Hadoop
3 14 (3.85%) PostgreSQL
4 10 (2.75%) KDB
5 7 (1.92%) Kdb+
6 6 (1.65%) RDBMS
7 5 (1.37%) MySQL
7 5 (1.37%) SQL Server
8 4 (1.10%) Amazon Athena
8 4 (1.10%) Data Lake
8 4 (1.10%) Data Warehouse
8 4 (1.10%) MongoDB
8 4 (1.10%) Pinecone
8 4 (1.10%) Weaviate
9 3 (0.82%) Delta Lake
10 2 (0.55%) Power Query
Development Applications
1 39 (10.71%) Git
2 11 (3.02%) MLflow
3 9 (2.47%) Jenkins
4 7 (1.92%) GitLab
5 5 (1.37%) PyCharm
6 3 (0.82%) TeamCity
6 3 (0.82%) Visual Studio
7 2 (0.55%) Cypress.io
7 2 (0.55%) GoCD
7 2 (0.55%) Gradle
7 2 (0.55%) Hardhat
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 (0.27%) Octopus Deploy
8 1 (0.27%) Postman
8 1 (0.27%) REST Assured
8 1 (0.27%) webpack
General
1 98 (26.92%) Social Skills
2 65 (17.86%) Analytical Skills
3 52 (14.29%) Finance
4 33 (9.07%) Front Office
5 30 (8.24%) Banking
6 21 (5.77%) Public Sector
7 9 (2.47%) Aerospace
7 9 (2.47%) Investment Banking
8 8 (2.20%) Electronics
8 8 (2.20%) Retail
8 8 (2.20%) Telecoms
9 7 (1.92%) Marketing
10 6 (1.65%) Aviation
10 6 (1.65%) Manufacturing
11 5 (1.37%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 5 (1.37%) Presentation Skills
12 4 (1.10%) Documentation Skills
12 4 (1.10%) Games
12 4 (1.10%) Police
12 4 (1.10%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 110 (30.22%) Developer
2 60 (16.48%) Senior
3 47 (12.91%) Data Scientist
3 47 (12.91%) Software Engineer
4 31 (8.52%) Python Developer
5 29 (7.97%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
6 26 (7.14%) Algorithm Engineer
7 23 (6.32%) C++ Developer
7 23 (6.32%) Senior Developer
8 20 (5.49%) Java Developer
8 20 (5.49%) Lead
8 20 (5.49%) Quantitative Developer
9 15 (4.12%) Architect
10 12 (3.30%) C++ Quantitative Developer
10 12 (3.30%) Linux Developer
10 12 (3.30%) Low Latency C++ Developer
11 11 (3.02%) Gen AI Engineer
12 9 (2.47%) Robotics Engineer
13 8 (2.20%) Consultant
13 8 (2.20%) Machine Learning Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 52 (14.29%) TensorFlow
2 50 (13.74%) PyTorch
3 41 (11.26%) Pandas
4 37 (10.16%) scikit-learn
5 35 (9.62%) NumPy
6 22 (6.04%) FIX Protocol
7 14 (3.85%) .NET
7 14 (3.85%) REST
8 13 (3.57%) Kafka
8 13 (3.57%) React
8 13 (3.57%) RESTful
9 12 (3.30%) PySpark
10 11 (3.02%) Matplotlib
10 11 (3.02%) Seaborn
11 10 (2.75%) Model Context Protocol
12 9 (2.47%) FastAPI
12 9 (2.47%) Hugging Face
12 9 (2.47%) XGBoost
13 8 (2.20%) A2A Protocol
13 8 (2.20%) Semantic Kernel
Miscellaneous
1 73 (20.05%) Data Structures
2 33 (9.07%) Equities
3 32 (8.79%) Distributed Systems
4 23 (6.32%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
5 19 (5.22%) Cloud Native
5 19 (5.22%) Derivative
6 16 (4.40%) Robotics
7 11 (3.02%) Equity Derivative
7 11 (3.02%) Fixed Income
8 9 (2.47%) Data Protection Act
8 9 (2.47%) PKI
9 8 (2.20%) Product Ownership
10 7 (1.92%) Clustering
11 6 (1.65%) Legacy Systems
12 5 (1.37%) Distributed Computing
12 5 (1.37%) FPGA
12 5 (1.37%) Greenfield Project
12 5 (1.37%) IoT
12 5 (1.37%) Mobile App
12 5 (1.37%) Onboarding
Operating Systems
1 19 (5.22%) Linux
2 7 (1.92%) Unix
3 3 (0.82%) Windows
4 2 (0.55%) Android
5 1 (0.27%) Apple iOS
5 1 (0.27%) Embedded Linux
5 1 (0.27%) Robot Operating System
5 1 (0.27%) Solaris
5 1 (0.27%) VMS
5 1 (0.27%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 167 (45.88%) Machine Learning
2 112 (30.77%) AI
3 93 (25.55%) Computer Science
4 89 (24.45%) Data Science
5 82 (22.53%) CI/CD
5 82 (22.53%) Problem-Solving
6 77 (21.15%) Software Engineering
7 67 (18.41%) Analytics
8 62 (17.03%) Agile
9 57 (15.66%) Mathematics
10 56 (15.38%) LLM
11 54 (14.84%) Data Pipeline
12 53 (14.56%) Statistics
13 50 (13.74%) Data Engineering
14 42 (11.54%) Test Automation
15 41 (11.26%) Containerisation
16 40 (10.99%) Data Analysis
17 38 (10.44%) Natural Language Processing
17 38 (10.44%) Visualisation
18 37 (10.16%) Low Latency
Programming Languages
1 200 (54.95%) Python
2 72 (19.78%) SQL
3 56 (15.38%) Java
4 39 (10.71%) C++
5 28 (7.69%) C#
5 28 (7.69%) MATLAB
6 19 (5.22%) R
7 18 (4.95%) Ada
8 17 (4.67%) TypeScript
9 15 (4.12%) PowerShell
10 12 (3.30%) JavaScript
11 11 (3.02%) Kotlin
12 10 (2.75%) Bash
13 9 (2.47%) Go
14 6 (1.65%) C
15 4 (1.10%) Rust
15 4 (1.10%) SystemVerilog
15 4 (1.10%) Tcl
16 3 (0.82%) SPARQL
17 2 (0.55%) Scala
Qualifications
1 92 (25.27%) Degree
2 47 (12.91%) Security Cleared
3 28 (7.69%) Master's Degree
4 25 (6.87%) Computer Science Degree
5 24 (6.59%) SC Cleared
6 16 (4.40%) PhD
7 13 (3.57%) Numerate Degree
8 11 (3.02%) BPSS Clearance
9 9 (2.47%) Microsoft Certified Professional
10 7 (1.92%) DBS Check
11 6 (1.65%) DV Cleared
12 4 (1.10%) CISM
12 4 (1.10%) CISSP
12 4 (1.10%) GIAC
12 4 (1.10%) HNC
12 4 (1.10%) HND
13 3 (0.82%) Cisco Certification
14 2 (0.55%) CCIE
14 2 (0.55%) CESG Certified Professional
14 2 (0.55%) CHECK Team Leader
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 15 (4.12%) QA
2 10 (2.75%) NIST
3 9 (2.47%) Data Quality
4 7 (1.92%) EU AI Act
5 6 (1.65%) Accessibility
6 4 (1.10%) Actionable Recommendations
6 4 (1.10%) DO-254
6 4 (1.10%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 3 (0.82%) 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 (0.27%) Disclosure Scotland
9 1 (0.27%) GDPR
System Software
1 41 (11.26%) Docker
2 8 (2.20%) Firmware
3 1 (0.27%) Active Directory
3 1 (0.27%) Oracle RAC
3 1 (0.27%) Squid
Systems Management
1 25 (6.87%) Kubernetes
2 16 (4.40%) Terraform
3 8 (2.20%) Grafana
4 3 (0.82%) Ansible
4 3 (0.82%) Kubeflow
4 3 (0.82%) Single Sign-On
5 2 (0.55%) Kibana
5 2 (0.55%) logstash
5 2 (0.55%) Prometheus
5 2 (0.55%) rkt
6 1 (0.27%) Data Guard
6 1 (0.27%) HP Fortify
6 1 (0.27%) ITRS Geneos
6 1 (0.27%) Oracle ZFS
Vendors
1 26 (7.14%) Microsoft
2 24 (6.59%) Databricks
3 12 (3.30%) Google
4 11 (3.02%) IBM
5 9 (2.47%) Foundry
6 8 (2.20%) SAP
7 7 (1.92%) MathWorks
8 6 (1.65%) Solace
8 6 (1.65%) Thales
9 5 (1.37%) Oracle
10 4 (1.10%) Actel
10 4 (1.10%) Altera
10 4 (1.10%) AppDynamics
10 4 (1.10%) Bloomberg
10 4 (1.10%) Charles River
10 4 (1.10%) F5
10 4 (1.10%) Intel
10 4 (1.10%) ION Trading
10 4 (1.10%) Splunk
10 4 (1.10%) Xilinx