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

6 months to
31 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 290 250 281
Rank change year-on-year -40 +31 +33
Contract jobs citing Algorithms 343 322 365
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.89% 1.02% 0.82%
As % of the Miscellaneous category 2.60% 3.15% 2.65%
Number of daily rates quoted 199 187 246
10th Percentile £335 £375 £400
25th Percentile £437 £449 £477
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £600 £588
Median % change year-on-year -8.33% +2.13% -16.07%
75th Percentile £744 £676 £702
90th Percentile £1,050 £818 £844
UK excluding London median daily rate £507 £545 £575
% change year-on-year -6.93% -5.22% -14.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 27 16 40
10th Percentile £44.10 £24.04 £40.68
25th Percentile £61.88 £29.06 £51.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £45.00 £55.00
Median % change year-on-year +44.44% -18.18% -3.27%
75th Percentile - £59.38 £58.75
90th Percentile £76.16 £73.13 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £42.50 £55.00
% change year-on-year +52.94% -22.73% -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 13,195 10,232 13,771
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 34.06% 32.54% 30.78%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,334 6,079 8,979
10th Percentile £275 £263 £253
25th Percentile £405 £407 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £535
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -1.87% -2.82%
75th Percentile £625 £656 £650
90th Percentile £738 £769 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 624 312 773
10th Percentile £15.00 £19.25 £14.00
25th Percentile £18.27 £23.60 £17.25
Median hourly rate £28.50 £35.00 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year -18.56% - +56.18%
75th Percentile £63.03 £65.00 £60.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £80.75 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £27.50 £32.50 £35.65
% change year-on-year -15.38% -8.84% +70.33%

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 31 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 31 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 31 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 -16 294 £572 -8.48% 294
London -10 168 £650 +4.00% 113
UK excluding London -50 141 £507 -6.93% 240
Work from Home -27 79 £605 +21.00% 85
North of England -41 34 £575 +16.16% 45
East of England -6 28 £345 -44.80% 30
Yorkshire -23 27 £675 - 12
South West -18 23 £500 -25.09% 37
South East -21 22 £593 +14.22% 82
Scotland +3 19 £418 -1.76% 14
West Midlands -36 13 £532 +33.00% 8
Midlands -38 13 £532 +33.00% 26
North West -41 6 £180 -63.64% 26
Wales -12 3 £400 -31.57% 10
Northern Ireland -3 1 - - 3
North East -16 1 £400 -36.00% 7

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 (5.54%) Apache Spark
2 15 (4.37%) Apache
3 13 (3.79%) Jupyter
4 9 (2.62%) Apache Airflow
5 8 (2.33%) Apache Pig
6 4 (1.17%) Confluence
7 3 (0.87%) IIS
Applications
1 17 (4.96%) Microsoft Excel
2 8 (2.33%) Chatbot
3 7 (2.04%) Simulink
4 4 (1.17%) Microsoft Office
5 3 (0.87%) LaTeX
5 3 (0.87%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 3 (0.87%) ProductWriter
2 2 (0.58%) Bloomberg AIM
2 2 (0.58%) Fidessa
3 1 (0.29%) Actimize
Cloud Services
1 67 (19.53%) AWS
1 67 (19.53%) Azure
2 31 (9.04%) Power Platform
3 25 (7.29%) GCP
4 22 (6.41%) GitHub
5 21 (6.12%) Serverless
6 19 (5.54%) Cloud Computing
7 18 (5.25%) Amazon SageMaker
8 13 (3.79%) Azure AKS
9 12 (3.50%) Amazon S3
9 12 (3.50%) AWS Lambda
9 12 (3.50%) GitHub Copilot
9 12 (3.50%) PaaS
10 10 (2.92%) Amazon ECS
10 10 (2.92%) Amazon EKS
11 9 (2.62%) Azure Functions
12 8 (2.33%) AWS CloudFormation
12 8 (2.33%) Azure Machine Learning
13 7 (2.04%) Snowflake
13 7 (2.04%) Vertex AI
Communications & Networking
1 6 (1.75%) Ethernet
2 5 (1.46%) VPN
3 4 (1.17%) HTTP
3 4 (1.17%) Internet
3 4 (1.17%) S/MIME
4 3 (0.87%) Network Security
4 3 (0.87%) SSL
5 2 (0.58%) 2G
5 2 (0.58%) BGP
5 2 (0.58%) BIG-IP
5 2 (0.58%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
5 2 (0.58%) Firewall
5 2 (0.58%) IPsec
5 2 (0.58%) LTE
5 2 (0.58%) MPLS
5 2 (0.58%) OSPF
5 2 (0.58%) Reverse Proxy
5 2 (0.58%) SNMP
5 2 (0.58%) SSH
5 2 (0.58%) Wireless
Database & Business Intelligence
1 29 (8.45%) Power BI
2 21 (6.12%) NoSQL
3 18 (5.25%) Hadoop
4 15 (4.37%) Relational Database
5 14 (4.08%) KDB
5 14 (4.08%) Kdb+
6 13 (3.79%) Big Data
6 13 (3.79%) Tableau
7 11 (3.21%) Data Mining
8 10 (2.92%) PostgreSQL
9 9 (2.62%) Apache Hive
10 7 (2.04%) Data Lake
10 7 (2.04%) Data Warehouse
10 7 (2.04%) Elasticsearch
10 7 (2.04%) RDBMS
11 5 (1.46%) MySQL
12 3 (0.87%) Amazon Athena
12 3 (0.87%) Delta Lake
12 3 (0.87%) OLTP
13 2 (0.58%) Geospatial Data
Development Applications
1 29 (8.45%) Git
2 11 (3.21%) Jenkins
2 11 (3.21%) MLflow
3 8 (2.33%) GitLab
4 5 (1.46%) PyCharm
4 5 (1.46%) QUnit
5 4 (1.17%) Gradle
5 4 (1.17%) JIRA
5 4 (1.17%) Maven
6 3 (0.87%) JUnit
6 3 (0.87%) Visual Studio
7 2 (0.58%) Cucumber
7 2 (0.58%) Cypress.io
7 2 (0.58%) Eclipse
7 2 (0.58%) IntelliJ
7 2 (0.58%) Log4j
7 2 (0.58%) Mockito
7 2 (0.58%) SonarQube
7 2 (0.58%) Subversion
7 2 (0.58%) TeamCity
General
1 95 (27.70%) Social Skills
2 65 (18.95%) Finance
3 46 (13.41%) Analytical Skills
4 40 (11.66%) Front Office
5 33 (9.62%) Banking
6 18 (5.25%) Public Sector
7 9 (2.62%) Investment Banking
8 8 (2.33%) Electronics
8 8 (2.33%) Retail
9 7 (2.04%) Legal
10 6 (1.75%) Games
10 6 (1.75%) Manufacturing
11 5 (1.46%) Influencing Skills
11 5 (1.46%) Telecoms
12 4 (1.17%) Financial Institution
12 4 (1.17%) Marketing
12 4 (1.17%) Publishing
13 3 (0.87%) Aerospace
13 3 (0.87%) Inclusion and Diversity
13 3 (0.87%) Law
Job Titles
1 100 (29.15%) Developer
2 45 (13.12%) Data Scientist
3 43 (12.54%) Senior
4 34 (9.91%) Software Engineer
5 27 (7.87%) Lead
6 26 (7.58%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
7 22 (6.41%) Python Developer
8 21 (6.12%) Quantitative Developer
9 20 (5.83%) C++ Developer
9 20 (5.83%) Data Engineer
10 19 (5.54%) Java Developer
10 19 (5.54%) Senior Developer
11 14 (4.08%) Architect
12 12 (3.50%) Algorithm Engineer
12 12 (3.50%) C++ Quantitative Developer
12 12 (3.50%) Linux Developer
12 12 (3.50%) Low Latency C++ Developer
13 11 (3.21%) Analyst
13 11 (3.21%) Machine Learning Engineer
14 9 (2.62%) Robotics Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 47 (13.70%) PyTorch
1 47 (13.70%) TensorFlow
2 36 (10.50%) Pandas
3 35 (10.20%) scikit-learn
4 30 (8.75%) NumPy
5 22 (6.41%) FIX Protocol
6 16 (4.66%) RESTful
7 14 (4.08%) .NET
8 13 (3.79%) A2A Protocol
8 13 (3.79%) Model Context Protocol
8 13 (3.79%) REST
8 13 (3.79%) Semantic Kernel
9 11 (3.21%) Matplotlib
10 10 (2.92%) PySpark
10 10 (2.92%) React
10 10 (2.92%) SQLAlchemy
10 10 (2.92%) XGBoost
11 9 (2.62%) FastAPI
11 9 (2.62%) Hugging Face
12 8 (2.33%) XML
Miscellaneous
1 66 (19.24%) Data Structures
2 27 (7.87%) Equities
3 23 (6.71%) Cloud Native
3 23 (6.71%) Distributed Systems
4 22 (6.41%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
5 20 (5.83%) Derivative
6 19 (5.54%) Fixed Income
7 13 (3.79%) Robotics
8 12 (3.50%) FPGA
9 11 (3.21%) Equity Derivative
9 11 (3.21%) PKI
10 10 (2.92%) Distributed Computing
10 10 (2.92%) Product Ownership
11 9 (2.62%) Data Protection Act
12 8 (2.33%) Clustering
13 6 (1.75%) PCIe
13 6 (1.75%) Verilog
13 6 (1.75%) VHDL
14 5 (1.46%) Legacy Systems
14 5 (1.46%) Onboarding
Operating Systems
1 30 (8.75%) Linux
2 13 (3.79%) Unix
3 3 (0.87%) Android
3 3 (0.87%) Apple iOS
3 3 (0.87%) Windows
4 2 (0.58%) Windows Server
5 1 (0.29%) Embedded Linux
5 1 (0.29%) Robot Operating System
5 1 (0.29%) Solaris
Processes & Methodologies
1 168 (48.98%) Machine Learning
2 102 (29.74%) AI
3 97 (28.28%) Data Science
4 85 (24.78%) Computer Science
5 82 (23.91%) Problem-Solving
6 70 (20.41%) Agile
7 64 (18.66%) CI/CD
8 60 (17.49%) Software Engineering
9 58 (16.91%) Mathematics
10 57 (16.62%) LLM
11 56 (16.33%) Analytics
12 54 (15.74%) Data Pipeline
13 47 (13.70%) Statistics
14 45 (13.12%) Deep Learning
14 45 (13.12%) Visualisation
15 41 (11.95%) Data Engineering
16 38 (11.08%) Data Analysis
17 37 (10.79%) Decision-Making
17 37 (10.79%) Natural Language Processing
17 37 (10.79%) Test Automation
Programming Languages
1 195 (56.85%) Python
2 69 (20.12%) SQL
3 64 (18.66%) Java
4 42 (12.24%) C++
5 27 (7.87%) MATLAB
6 21 (6.12%) C#
7 16 (4.66%) PowerShell
7 16 (4.66%) Scala
8 13 (3.79%) Bash
8 13 (3.79%) TypeScript
9 11 (3.21%) R
10 9 (2.62%) Ada
10 9 (2.62%) JavaScript
11 6 (1.75%) SystemVerilog
11 6 (1.75%) Tcl
12 4 (1.17%) C
12 4 (1.17%) Go
12 4 (1.17%) Rust
13 2 (0.58%) Perl
13 2 (0.58%) VBA
Qualifications
1 79 (23.03%) Degree
2 44 (12.83%) Security Cleared
3 29 (8.45%) SC Cleared
4 25 (7.29%) Computer Science Degree
5 23 (6.71%) Master's Degree
6 14 (4.08%) PhD
7 13 (3.79%) Microsoft Certified Professional
8 12 (3.50%) Numerate Degree
9 6 (1.75%) CISSP
9 6 (1.75%) DV Cleared
9 6 (1.75%) HNC
9 6 (1.75%) HND
10 5 (1.46%) GIAC
11 4 (1.17%) CISM
12 3 (0.87%) Cisco Certification
12 3 (0.87%) DBS Check
12 3 (0.87%) Postgraduate
13 2 (0.58%) CCDP
13 2 (0.58%) CCIE
13 2 (0.58%) CEH
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 17 (4.96%) NIST
2 15 (4.37%) QA
3 12 (3.50%) EU AI Act
4 9 (2.62%) Data Quality
5 6 (1.75%) Accessibility
5 6 (1.75%) DO-254
6 4 (1.17%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 4 (1.17%) PCI DSS
7 3 (0.87%) SLA
8 2 (0.58%) Actionable Recommendations
8 2 (0.58%) Disclosure Scotland
8 2 (0.58%) EMIR
8 2 (0.58%) FIPS 140-2
8 2 (0.58%) JSP 440
8 2 (0.58%) NCSC
8 2 (0.58%) RMADS
System Software
1 34 (9.91%) Docker
2 9 (2.62%) Firmware
3 3 (0.87%) Virtual Machines
4 1 (0.29%) Active Directory
4 1 (0.29%) Oracle RAC
4 1 (0.29%) Squid
Systems Management
1 31 (9.04%) Kubernetes
2 20 (5.83%) Terraform
3 8 (2.33%) Grafana
4 6 (1.75%) Ansible
5 5 (1.46%) Kibana
5 5 (1.46%) logstash
6 4 (1.17%) ITRS Geneos
7 3 (0.87%) Single Sign-On
8 2 (0.58%) Prometheus
8 2 (0.58%) rkt
9 1 (0.29%) Data Guard
9 1 (0.29%) Kubeflow
9 1 (0.29%) Oracle ZFS
9 1 (0.29%) Rundeck
Vendors
1 39 (11.37%) Microsoft
2 15 (4.37%) Databricks
2 15 (4.37%) Splunk
3 13 (3.79%) Foundry
4 11 (3.21%) Xilinx
5 10 (2.92%) Google
6 8 (2.33%) IBM
6 8 (2.33%) Thales
7 6 (1.75%) Actel
7 6 (1.75%) Altera
7 6 (1.75%) Intel
7 6 (1.75%) Microsemi
7 6 (1.75%) TIBCO
8 5 (1.46%) MathWorks
8 5 (1.46%) Oracle
8 5 (1.46%) Solace
9 4 (1.17%) SAP
10 3 (0.87%) Cognos
10 3 (0.87%) ION Trading
10 3 (0.87%) Sage