R Contract Job Trends

R
UK

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs requiring R skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 29 March 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
29 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 457 366 374
Rank change year-on-year -91 +8 +54
Contract jobs citing R 176 160 221
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.40% 0.55% 0.50%
As % of the Programming Languages category 1.38% 1.61% 1.71%
Number of daily rates quoted 117 111 152
10th Percentile £313 £350 £313
25th Percentile £406 £406 £388
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £510 £525 £541
Median % change year-on-year -2.86% -2.91% -1.68%
75th Percentile £575 £675 £641
90th Percentile £650 £774 £763
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £455 £413
% change year-on-year +4.40% +10.30% -2.94%
Number of hourly rates quoted 6 7 13
10th Percentile £22.85 £22.00 £25.36
25th Percentile £26.41 £22.75 £25.50
Median hourly rate £36.50 £26.32 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +38.68% -38.07% -29.17%
75th Percentile £57.56 £56.25 £52.50
90th Percentile £60.35 £59.55 £72.93
UK excluding London median hourly rate £27.71 £23.00 £25.36
% change year-on-year +20.47% -9.31% -2.76%

All Programming Languages
UK

R falls under the Programming Languages category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring coding skills.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for coding skills 12,778 9,947 12,914
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 28.68% 33.97% 29.19%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,483 6,693 9,128
10th Percentile £352 £356 £350
25th Percentile £413 £419 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £600 £638 £650
90th Percentile £715 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £480 £488
% change year-on-year -1.04% -1.54% -2.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 520 244 486
10th Percentile £41.13 £22.30 £30.63
25th Percentile £53.75 £32.88 £46.20
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +4.17% -4.00%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.56 £67.38
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £64.00 £61.60
% change year-on-year +1.56% +3.90% -3.75%

R
Job Vacancy Trend

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing R relative to all contract IT jobs advertised.

R job vacancy trend in the UK

R
Daily Rate Trend

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing R.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing R

R
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing R over the 6 months to 29 March 2026.

Daily rate histogram for R in the UK

R
Hourly Rate Trend

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing R.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing R

R
Hourly Rate Histogram

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing R over the 6 months to 29 March 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for R in the UK

R
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 R within the UK over the 6 months to 29 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 -91 154 £510 -2.86% 187
London -49 87 £525 -4.55% 62
Work from Home +10 67 £531 +11.68% 40
UK excluding London -98 64 £475 +4.40% 154
South East -40 18 £594 +49.84% 39
North of England -54 16 £492 +8.13% 34
Midlands -63 15 £395 +1.94% 23
North West -35 11 £513 +12.77% 14
East Midlands -23 10 £385 +31.40% 15
South West -30 7 £325 -25.71% 22
East of England -37 6 £413 -36.54% 21
West Midlands -59 5 £438 +6.84% 8
Yorkshire -57 4 £425 +21.43% 13
Wales -9 2 £425 - 7
North East - 1 £475 - 7

R
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 34 (19.32%) Apache Spark
2 10 (5.68%) Apache
3 9 (5.11%) SAS
4 5 (2.84%) SharePoint
5 3 (1.70%) Apache Superset
6 2 (1.14%) Apache Airflow
7 1 (0.57%) Confluence
7 1 (0.57%) Jupyter
7 1 (0.57%) R Markdown
Applications
1 16 (9.09%) Microsoft Excel
2 3 (1.70%) Microsoft Office
3 1 (0.57%) Chatbot
3 1 (0.57%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 1 (0.57%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 2 (1.14%) SAP IBP
2 1 (0.57%) Salesforce CRM
2 1 (0.57%) SAP APO
2 1 (0.57%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 63 (35.80%) Power Platform
2 52 (29.55%) AWS
3 48 (27.27%) Azure
4 21 (11.93%) GCP
5 8 (4.55%) Power Automate
5 8 (4.55%) PowerApps
6 7 (3.98%) Snowflake
7 6 (3.41%) Azure Data Factory
8 5 (2.84%) Azure DevOps
8 5 (2.84%) Microsoft Purview
9 3 (1.70%) Amazon Bedrock
9 3 (1.70%) Azure Synapse Analytics
9 3 (1.70%) Copilot Studio
9 3 (1.70%) dbt
9 3 (1.70%) OpenShift
10 2 (1.14%) Amazon EMR
10 2 (1.14%) Amazon Kinesis
10 2 (1.14%) Amazon SageMaker
10 2 (1.14%) Azure Machine Learning
10 2 (1.14%) Google Analytics
Communications & Networking
1 2 (1.14%) 2G
1 2 (1.14%) 5G
1 2 (1.14%) LTE
1 2 (1.14%) Mobile Backhaul
1 2 (1.14%) VoIP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 63 (35.80%) Power BI
2 49 (27.84%) Tableau
3 34 (19.32%) Big Data
4 25 (14.20%) Hadoop
5 23 (13.07%) Data Warehouse
6 11 (6.25%) Looker
7 8 (4.55%) Power Query
8 7 (3.98%) Delta Lake
8 7 (3.98%) Metadata
8 7 (3.98%) Mixpanel
8 7 (3.98%) Relational Database
8 7 (3.98%) Spark SQL
9 6 (3.41%) Data Lake
9 6 (3.41%) NoSQL
10 5 (2.84%) Amazon Redshift
10 5 (2.84%) Data Mining
10 5 (2.84%) SQL Server
11 2 (1.14%) Amazon Athena
11 2 (1.14%) BigQuery
11 2 (1.14%) Weaviate
Development Applications
1 11 (6.25%) Git
2 6 (3.41%) Jenkins
3 2 (1.14%) GoCD
3 2 (1.14%) MLflow
3 2 (1.14%) RStudio
3 2 (1.14%) SonarQube
3 2 (1.14%) Sonatype Nexus
3 2 (1.14%) TeamCity
4 1 (0.57%) Bitbucket
4 1 (0.57%) JIRA
4 1 (0.57%) Maven
General
1 54 (30.68%) Analytical Skills
2 52 (29.55%) Social Skills
3 38 (21.59%) Finance
4 32 (18.18%) Public Sector
5 13 (7.39%) Pharmaceutical
6 12 (6.82%) Marketing
7 10 (5.68%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 6 (3.41%) Telecoms
9 5 (2.84%) Banking
10 2 (1.14%) Documentation Skills
10 2 (1.14%) Financial Institution
10 2 (1.14%) Influencing Skills
10 2 (1.14%) Manufacturing
10 2 (1.14%) Presentation Skills
10 2 (1.14%) Retail
10 2 (1.14%) Social Science
11 1 (0.57%) Billing
11 1 (0.57%) Local Government
11 1 (0.57%) Private Banking
11 1 (0.57%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 53 (30.11%) Data Scientist
2 32 (18.18%) Analyst
3 28 (15.91%) Data Analyst
4 26 (14.77%) Senior
5 19 (10.80%) Data Engineer
6 18 (10.23%) Developer
7 17 (9.66%) Senior Data Scientist
8 12 (6.82%) Architect
9 11 (6.25%) Lead
10 6 (3.41%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
10 6 (3.41%) Business Intelligence Developer
10 6 (3.41%) Consultant
10 6 (3.41%) Lead Data Scientist
11 5 (2.84%) Azure Engineer
11 5 (2.84%) Java Developer
11 5 (2.84%) Power BI Developer
12 4 (2.27%) Data Analytics Engineer
12 4 (2.27%) Senior Analyst
12 4 (2.27%) Software Engineer
13 3 (1.70%) Business Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 13 (7.39%) TensorFlow
2 10 (5.68%) PyTorch
3 9 (5.11%) Pandas
3 9 (5.11%) PySpark
3 9 (5.11%) scikit-learn
4 8 (4.55%) JSON
5 6 (3.41%) Keras
5 6 (3.41%) Shiny
6 5 (2.84%) Kafka
6 5 (2.84%) YAML
7 4 (2.27%) LangChain
7 4 (2.27%) Matplotlib
7 4 (2.27%) Seaborn
8 3 (1.70%) FastAPI
8 3 (1.70%) Hugging Face
8 3 (1.70%) NumPy
8 3 (1.70%) Plotly
9 2 (1.14%) Node.js
9 2 (1.14%) SciPy
9 2 (1.14%) XML
Miscellaneous
1 19 (10.80%) Algorithms
2 9 (5.11%) Cloud Native
3 7 (3.98%) Credit Risk
4 6 (3.41%) CRISPR
4 6 (3.41%) Data Structures
4 6 (3.41%) Product Ownership
5 5 (2.84%) Self-Motivation
6 3 (1.70%) AI Agents
6 3 (1.70%) Hybrid Cloud
6 3 (1.70%) Management Information System
6 3 (1.70%) Multi-touch
6 3 (1.70%) Onboarding
7 2 (1.14%) Analytical Mindset
7 2 (1.14%) Data Protection Act
7 2 (1.14%) Distributed Computing
7 2 (1.14%) Distributed Systems
7 2 (1.14%) IoT
7 2 (1.14%) Mobile App
8 1 (0.57%) Data Fabric
8 1 (0.57%) Legacy Systems
Operating Systems
1 2 (1.14%) Linux
2 1 (0.57%) Unix
2 1 (0.57%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 94 (53.41%) Analytics
2 93 (52.84%) Data Science
3 74 (42.05%) Visualisation
4 73 (41.48%) Machine Learning
5 63 (35.80%) Business Intelligence
6 50 (28.41%) Decision-Making
7 41 (23.30%) Data Analysis
8 40 (22.73%) Actionable Insight
8 40 (22.73%) Data Visualisation
8 40 (22.73%) Statistical Modelling
9 39 (22.16%) Data Pipeline
9 39 (22.16%) Problem-Solving
10 37 (21.02%) Data Modelling
11 33 (18.75%) Agile
12 32 (18.18%) AI
13 30 (17.05%) Data Analytics
13 30 (17.05%) Data Governance
14 27 (15.34%) Statistics
15 26 (14.77%) Dashboard Development
15 26 (14.77%) Validation
Programming Languages
1 166 (94.32%) Python
2 128 (72.73%) SQL
3 12 (6.82%) Java
4 10 (5.68%) Data Analysis Expressions
5 7 (3.98%) JavaScript
6 6 (3.41%) Scala
7 5 (2.84%) C++
8 4 (2.27%) C#
9 3 (1.70%) TypeScript
10 2 (1.14%) Ada
10 2 (1.14%) Go
10 2 (1.14%) Rust
10 2 (1.14%) VBA
11 1 (0.57%) LookML
11 1 (0.57%) SAS Macro
Qualifications
1 44 (25.00%) Security Cleared
2 37 (21.02%) SC Cleared
3 32 (18.18%) Degree
4 8 (4.55%) Computer Science Degree
5 7 (3.98%) Master's Degree
6 6 (3.41%) Microsoft Certification
7 5 (2.84%) PhD
8 4 (2.27%) BPSS Clearance
9 3 (1.70%) Azure Certification
10 2 (1.14%) Tableau Certification
11 1 (0.57%) CIMA
11 1 (0.57%) CTC Cleared
11 1 (0.57%) DBS Check
11 1 (0.57%) DV Cleared
11 1 (0.57%) Numerate Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 23 (13.07%) Data Quality
2 11 (6.25%) Actionable Recommendations
3 9 (5.11%) QA
4 7 (3.98%) GDPR
5 3 (1.70%) Accessibility
6 2 (1.14%) PCI DSS
6 2 (1.14%) WCAG
7 1 (0.57%) MiFID
7 1 (0.57%) Sarbanes-Oxley
System Software
1 7 (3.98%) Docker
2 2 (1.14%) HDFS
Systems Management
1 11 (6.25%) Kubernetes
2 4 (2.27%) Terraform
3 2 (1.14%) rkt
4 1 (0.57%) Progress Chef
Vendors
1 22 (12.50%) Databricks
2 18 (10.23%) Microsoft
3 7 (3.98%) Amplitude
3 7 (3.98%) Pega
4 5 (2.84%) OpenAI
5 4 (2.27%) ServiceNow
6 3 (1.70%) Google
6 3 (1.70%) Informatica
6 3 (1.70%) Oracle
6 3 (1.70%) Red Hat
6 3 (1.70%) SAP
7 2 (1.14%) Dynatrace
7 2 (1.14%) Splunk
8 1 (0.57%) Adobe
8 1 (0.57%) Alteryx
8 1 (0.57%) Arqiva
8 1 (0.57%) Cognos
8 1 (0.57%) Salesforce
8 1 (0.57%) TIBCO
8 1 (0.57%) UiPath