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

6 months to
29 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 292 251 279
Rank change year-on-year -41 +28 +27
Contract jobs citing Algorithms 339 321 349
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.88% 1.02% 0.80%
As % of the Miscellaneous category 2.58% 3.13% 2.59%
Number of daily rates quoted 198 186 241
10th Percentile £335 £375 £400
25th Percentile £435 £448 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £600 £588
Median % change year-on-year -8.33% +2.13% -16.67%
75th Percentile £747 £676 £700
90th Percentile £1,050 £819 £838
UK excluding London median daily rate £507 £541 £575
% change year-on-year -6.28% -5.87% -14.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 27 16 31
10th Percentile £44.10 £24.04 £41.25
25th Percentile £61.88 £32.16 £47.13
Median hourly rate £65.00 £46.25 £55.00
Median % change year-on-year +40.54% -15.91% -3.27%
75th Percentile - £59.38 £58.75
90th Percentile £76.16 £73.13 £68.00
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 13,125 10,246 13,479
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 34.10% 32.55% 30.75%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,288 6,069 8,796
10th Percentile £275 £263 £255
25th Percentile £405 £406 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £535
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -1.87% -3.60%
75th Percentile £625 £657 £650
90th Percentile £738 £775 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 624 310 734
10th Percentile £15.00 £19.18 £14.00
25th Percentile £18.45 £23.65 £17.29
Median hourly rate £28.50 £35.00 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year -18.56% - +55.66%
75th Percentile £62.63 £65.00 £60.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £80.90 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £27.50 £32.50 £35.50
% change year-on-year -15.38% -8.45% +71.46%

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 29 January 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 29 January 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 29 January 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 -29 292 £568 -9.20% 447
London -4 165 £675 +8.00% 122
UK excluding London -49 140 £507 -6.28% 399
Work from Home -27 77 £585 +23.16% 166
North of England -48 34 £575 +16.16% 66
East of England -4 28 £345 -43.67% 54
Yorkshire -28 27 £675 - 21
South West -14 23 £500 -25.09% 58
South East -24 22 £593 +14.22% 137
Scotland -2 17 £410 -3.53% 25
West Midlands -27 14 £525 +31.25% 13
Midlands -49 14 £525 +31.25% 43
North West -35 6 £180 -63.64% 34
Wales -13 3 £400 -31.57% 20
Northern Ireland -6 1 - - 8
North East -14 1 £400 -36.00% 11

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 19 (5.60%) Apache Spark
2 13 (3.83%) Apache
2 13 (3.83%) Jupyter
3 8 (2.36%) Apache Pig
4 7 (2.06%) Apache Airflow
5 5 (1.47%) Confluence
6 3 (0.88%) IIS
Applications
1 17 (5.01%) Microsoft Excel
2 8 (2.36%) Chatbot
3 7 (2.06%) Simulink
4 4 (1.18%) Microsoft Office
5 3 (0.88%) LaTeX
5 3 (0.88%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 3 (0.88%) ProductWriter
2 2 (0.59%) Bloomberg AIM
2 2 (0.59%) Fidessa
3 1 (0.29%) Actimize
Cloud Services
1 68 (20.06%) Azure
2 64 (18.88%) AWS
3 32 (9.44%) Power Platform
4 25 (7.37%) GCP
5 22 (6.49%) GitHub
6 19 (5.60%) Cloud Computing
6 19 (5.60%) Serverless
7 18 (5.31%) Amazon SageMaker
8 13 (3.83%) Azure AKS
9 12 (3.54%) GitHub Copilot
9 12 (3.54%) PaaS
10 10 (2.95%) Amazon S3
10 10 (2.95%) AWS Lambda
11 9 (2.65%) Azure Functions
12 8 (2.36%) Amazon ECS
12 8 (2.36%) Amazon EKS
12 8 (2.36%) AWS CloudFormation
12 8 (2.36%) Azure Machine Learning
13 7 (2.06%) Snowflake
13 7 (2.06%) Vertex AI
Communications & Networking
1 6 (1.77%) Ethernet
2 5 (1.47%) VPN
3 4 (1.18%) Internet
3 4 (1.18%) S/MIME
4 3 (0.88%) Network Security
4 3 (0.88%) SSL
5 2 (0.59%) 2G
5 2 (0.59%) BGP
5 2 (0.59%) BIG-IP
5 2 (0.59%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
5 2 (0.59%) Firewall
5 2 (0.59%) HTTP
5 2 (0.59%) IPsec
5 2 (0.59%) LTE
5 2 (0.59%) MPLS
5 2 (0.59%) OSPF
5 2 (0.59%) Reverse Proxy
5 2 (0.59%) SNMP
5 2 (0.59%) SSH
5 2 (0.59%) Wireless
Database & Business Intelligence
1 30 (8.85%) Power BI
2 21 (6.19%) NoSQL
3 18 (5.31%) Hadoop
4 15 (4.42%) Relational Database
5 14 (4.13%) KDB
5 14 (4.13%) Kdb+
6 13 (3.83%) Big Data
6 13 (3.83%) Tableau
7 11 (3.24%) Data Mining
8 10 (2.95%) PostgreSQL
9 9 (2.65%) Apache Hive
10 7 (2.06%) Data Lake
10 7 (2.06%) Data Warehouse
10 7 (2.06%) Elasticsearch
10 7 (2.06%) RDBMS
11 5 (1.47%) MySQL
12 3 (0.88%) Amazon Athena
12 3 (0.88%) Delta Lake
12 3 (0.88%) OLTP
13 2 (0.59%) Geospatial Data
Development Applications
1 29 (8.55%) Git
2 11 (3.24%) Jenkins
3 9 (2.65%) MLflow
4 8 (2.36%) GitLab
5 5 (1.47%) JIRA
5 5 (1.47%) PyCharm
5 5 (1.47%) QUnit
6 4 (1.18%) Gradle
6 4 (1.18%) Maven
7 3 (0.88%) JUnit
7 3 (0.88%) Visual Studio
8 2 (0.59%) Cucumber
8 2 (0.59%) Cypress.io
8 2 (0.59%) Eclipse
8 2 (0.59%) IntelliJ
8 2 (0.59%) Log4j
8 2 (0.59%) Mockito
8 2 (0.59%) SonarQube
8 2 (0.59%) Subversion
8 2 (0.59%) TeamCity
General
1 93 (27.43%) Social Skills
2 64 (18.88%) Finance
3 45 (13.27%) Analytical Skills
4 40 (11.80%) Front Office
5 32 (9.44%) Banking
6 17 (5.01%) Public Sector
7 9 (2.65%) Investment Banking
8 8 (2.36%) Electronics
8 8 (2.36%) Retail
9 7 (2.06%) Legal
10 6 (1.77%) Games
10 6 (1.77%) Manufacturing
11 5 (1.47%) Telecoms
12 4 (1.18%) Financial Institution
12 4 (1.18%) Influencing Skills
12 4 (1.18%) Marketing
12 4 (1.18%) Publishing
13 3 (0.88%) Aerospace
13 3 (0.88%) Inclusion and Diversity
13 3 (0.88%) Law
Job Titles
1 100 (29.50%) Developer
2 44 (12.98%) Data Scientist
3 41 (12.09%) Senior
4 34 (10.03%) Software Engineer
5 26 (7.67%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
5 26 (7.67%) Lead
6 22 (6.49%) Python Developer
7 21 (6.19%) Quantitative Developer
8 20 (5.90%) C++ Developer
8 20 (5.90%) Data Engineer
9 19 (5.60%) Java Developer
9 19 (5.60%) Senior Developer
10 14 (4.13%) Architect
11 12 (3.54%) Algorithm Engineer
11 12 (3.54%) C++ Quantitative Developer
11 12 (3.54%) Linux Developer
11 12 (3.54%) Low Latency C++ Developer
12 11 (3.24%) Analyst
12 11 (3.24%) Machine Learning Engineer
13 9 (2.65%) Robotics Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 47 (13.86%) TensorFlow
2 45 (13.27%) PyTorch
3 35 (10.32%) scikit-learn
4 34 (10.03%) Pandas
5 28 (8.26%) NumPy
6 22 (6.49%) FIX Protocol
7 16 (4.72%) RESTful
8 14 (4.13%) .NET
9 13 (3.83%) Semantic Kernel
10 11 (3.24%) Matplotlib
10 11 (3.24%) REST
11 10 (2.95%) PySpark
11 10 (2.95%) React
11 10 (2.95%) XGBoost
12 8 (2.36%) Kafka
12 8 (2.36%) SQLAlchemy
12 8 (2.36%) XML
13 7 (2.06%) FastAPI
13 7 (2.06%) HTML
13 7 (2.06%) Hugging Face
Miscellaneous
1 64 (18.88%) Data Structures
2 27 (7.96%) Equities
3 23 (6.78%) Cloud Native
3 23 (6.78%) Distributed Systems
4 22 (6.49%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
5 20 (5.90%) Derivative
6 19 (5.60%) Fixed Income
7 13 (3.83%) Robotics
8 12 (3.54%) FPGA
9 11 (3.24%) Equity Derivative
9 11 (3.24%) PKI
10 10 (2.95%) Distributed Computing
11 9 (2.65%) Data Protection Act
11 9 (2.65%) Product Ownership
12 8 (2.36%) Clustering
13 6 (1.77%) PCIe
13 6 (1.77%) Verilog
13 6 (1.77%) VHDL
14 5 (1.47%) Mobile App
14 5 (1.47%) Onboarding
Operating Systems
1 30 (8.85%) Linux
2 13 (3.83%) Unix
3 3 (0.88%) Android
3 3 (0.88%) Apple iOS
3 3 (0.88%) Windows
4 2 (0.59%) Windows Server
5 1 (0.29%) Embedded Linux
5 1 (0.29%) Robot Operating System
5 1 (0.29%) Solaris
Processes & Methodologies
1 164 (48.38%) Machine Learning
2 99 (29.20%) AI
3 95 (28.02%) Data Science
4 84 (24.78%) Computer Science
5 82 (24.19%) Problem-Solving
6 69 (20.35%) Agile
7 63 (18.58%) CI/CD
8 60 (17.70%) Software Engineering
9 58 (17.11%) Mathematics
10 56 (16.52%) Analytics
11 55 (16.22%) LLM
12 53 (15.63%) Data Pipeline
13 47 (13.86%) Statistics
14 45 (13.27%) Visualisation
15 42 (12.39%) Deep Learning
16 41 (12.09%) Data Engineering
17 38 (11.21%) Data Analysis
17 38 (11.21%) Decision-Making
18 37 (10.91%) Natural Language Processing
18 37 (10.91%) Test Automation
Programming Languages
1 193 (56.93%) Python
2 69 (20.35%) SQL
3 64 (18.88%) Java
4 42 (12.39%) C++
5 27 (7.96%) MATLAB
6 21 (6.19%) C#
7 16 (4.72%) PowerShell
7 16 (4.72%) Scala
8 13 (3.83%) Bash
8 13 (3.83%) TypeScript
9 12 (3.54%) R
10 9 (2.65%) Ada
10 9 (2.65%) JavaScript
11 6 (1.77%) SystemVerilog
11 6 (1.77%) Tcl
12 4 (1.18%) C
12 4 (1.18%) Go
12 4 (1.18%) Rust
13 2 (0.59%) VBA
13 2 (0.59%) VC++
Qualifications
1 78 (23.01%) Degree
2 44 (12.98%) Security Cleared
3 29 (8.55%) SC Cleared
4 25 (7.37%) Computer Science Degree
5 22 (6.49%) Master's Degree
6 13 (3.83%) MCP
6 13 (3.83%) PhD
7 12 (3.54%) Numerate Degree
8 6 (1.77%) CISSP
8 6 (1.77%) DV Cleared
8 6 (1.77%) HNC
8 6 (1.77%) HND
9 5 (1.47%) GIAC
10 4 (1.18%) CISM
11 3 (0.88%) Cisco Certification
11 3 (0.88%) DBS Check
11 3 (0.88%) Postgraduate
12 2 (0.59%) CESG Certified Professional
12 2 (0.59%) CHECK Team Leader
12 2 (0.59%) CREST Certified
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 17 (5.01%) NIST
2 14 (4.13%) QA
3 12 (3.54%) EU AI Act
4 9 (2.65%) Data Quality
5 6 (1.77%) DO-254
6 5 (1.47%) Accessibility
7 4 (1.18%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 4 (1.18%) PCI DSS
8 3 (0.88%) SLA
9 2 (0.59%) Actionable Recommendations
9 2 (0.59%) EMIR
9 2 (0.59%) FIPS 140-2
9 2 (0.59%) JSP 440
9 2 (0.59%) NCSC
9 2 (0.59%) RMADS
10 1 (0.29%) Disclosure Scotland
System Software
1 34 (10.03%) Docker
2 9 (2.65%) Firmware
3 3 (0.88%) Virtual Machines
4 1 (0.29%) Active Directory
4 1 (0.29%) Oracle RAC
4 1 (0.29%) Squid
Systems Management
1 29 (8.55%) Kubernetes
2 20 (5.90%) Terraform
3 6 (1.77%) Ansible
3 6 (1.77%) Grafana
4 5 (1.47%) Kibana
4 5 (1.47%) logstash
5 4 (1.18%) ITRS Geneos
6 3 (0.88%) Single Sign-On
7 2 (0.59%) Prometheus
7 2 (0.59%) rkt
8 1 (0.29%) Data Guard
8 1 (0.29%) Kubeflow
8 1 (0.29%) Oracle ZFS
8 1 (0.29%) Rundeck
Vendors
1 39 (11.50%) Microsoft
2 16 (4.72%) Databricks
3 15 (4.42%) Splunk
4 13 (3.83%) Foundry
5 11 (3.24%) Xilinx
6 10 (2.95%) Google
7 8 (2.36%) IBM
7 8 (2.36%) Thales
8 6 (1.77%) Actel
8 6 (1.77%) Altera
8 6 (1.77%) Intel
8 6 (1.77%) Microsemi
8 6 (1.77%) TIBCO
9 5 (1.47%) MathWorks
9 5 (1.47%) Oracle
9 5 (1.47%) Solace
10 4 (1.18%) SAP
11 3 (0.88%) Cognos
11 3 (0.88%) ION Trading
11 3 (0.88%) Sage