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 25 February 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
25 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 436 344 373
Rank change year-on-year -92 +29 +54
Contract jobs citing R 166 200 226
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.40% 0.66% 0.51%
As % of the Programming Languages category 1.34% 1.94% 1.74%
Number of daily rates quoted 103 113 160
10th Percentile £313 £300 £308
25th Percentile £413 £385 £376
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -4.55%
75th Percentile £600 £638 £638
90th Percentile £688 £800 £763
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £455 £380
% change year-on-year +9.89% +19.74% -15.56%
Number of hourly rates quoted 7 5 13
10th Percentile £23.32 £21.75 £25.36
25th Percentile £27.60 £22.50 £25.50
Median hourly rate £32.50 £52.50 £35.63
Median % change year-on-year -38.10% +47.35% -4.99%
75th Percentile £54.88 £58.75 £47.50
90th Percentile £60.33 £59.95 £51.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £30.00 - £23.55
% change year-on-year - - +6.25%

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 12,373 10,296 12,974
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 29.96% 33.80% 29.42%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,255 6,625 9,182
10th Percentile £352 £355 £350
25th Percentile £413 £420 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £530
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -0.94% -5.36%
75th Percentile £606 £638 £650
90th Percentile £715 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £480 £483 £500
% change year-on-year -0.52% -3.50% -1.57%
Number of hourly rates quoted 476 236 493
10th Percentile £41.25 £21.63 £35.10
25th Percentile £53.53 £35.56 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +4.17% -4.76%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £69.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £76.53
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.75 £62.50
% change year-on-year +1.97% +1.99% -3.85%

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 25 February 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 25 February 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 25 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 -103 144 £525 +5.00% 270
London -62 78 £543 -1.27% 76
UK excluding London -102 61 £500 +9.89% 266
Work from Home 0 60 £531 +3.51% 49
South East -40 17 £600 +20.00% 69
Midlands -54 17 £395 +6.25% 44
North of England -58 13 £500 +32.28% 64
East Midlands -23 11 £385 +20.88% 26
North West -32 11 £513 +35.75% 28
East of England -28 7 £641 -1.38% 31
West Midlands -55 6 £438 +6.84% 17
Wales -2 4 £366 - 12
South West -35 3 - - 30
North East -18 1 £475 - 14
Yorkshire - 1 - - 24

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 29 (17.47%) Apache Spark
2 15 (9.04%) SAS
3 8 (4.82%) SharePoint
4 5 (3.01%) Apache
4 5 (3.01%) Apache Airflow
5 1 (0.60%) Apache Superset
5 1 (0.60%) Confluence
5 1 (0.60%) Jupyter
Applications
1 17 (10.24%) Microsoft Excel
2 5 (3.01%) Microsoft Office
3 4 (2.41%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 1 (0.60%) ProjectWise
Business Applications
1 1 (0.60%) Salesforce CRM
1 1 (0.60%) SAP ERP
1 1 (0.60%) SAP IBP
1 1 (0.60%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 60 (36.14%) Power Platform
2 46 (27.71%) AWS
2 46 (27.71%) Azure
3 22 (13.25%) GCP
4 9 (5.42%) Snowflake
5 8 (4.82%) Power Automate
5 8 (4.82%) PowerApps
6 5 (3.01%) Microsoft Purview
7 4 (2.41%) Azure Data Factory
7 4 (2.41%) Azure DevOps
7 4 (2.41%) dbt
8 3 (1.81%) Amazon Bedrock
8 3 (1.81%) Azure Machine Learning
8 3 (1.81%) Azure Synapse Analytics
8 3 (1.81%) Copilot Studio
8 3 (1.81%) OpenShift
9 2 (1.20%) Amazon EMR
9 2 (1.20%) Azure AKS
9 2 (1.20%) Cloud Computing
9 2 (1.20%) Google Analytics
Communications & Networking
1 2 (1.20%) 2G
1 2 (1.20%) 5G
1 2 (1.20%) LTE
1 2 (1.20%) Mobile Backhaul
1 2 (1.20%) VoIP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 60 (36.14%) Power BI
2 44 (26.51%) Tableau
3 28 (16.87%) Big Data
4 22 (13.25%) Hadoop
5 18 (10.84%) Data Warehouse
6 13 (7.83%) Looker
7 7 (4.22%) Data Lake
7 7 (4.22%) Data Mining
7 7 (4.22%) Delta Lake
7 7 (4.22%) Metadata
7 7 (4.22%) Mixpanel
7 7 (4.22%) NoSQL
7 7 (4.22%) Power Query
8 6 (3.61%) Relational Database
8 6 (3.61%) Spark SQL
9 5 (3.01%) Amazon Redshift
10 4 (2.41%) SQL Server
11 3 (1.81%) BigQuery
12 2 (1.20%) Amazon Athena
12 2 (1.20%) Azure SQL Database
Development Applications
1 12 (7.23%) Git
2 6 (3.61%) Jenkins
3 3 (1.81%) MLflow
4 2 (1.20%) GoCD
4 2 (1.20%) RStudio
4 2 (1.20%) SonarQube
4 2 (1.20%) Sonatype Nexus
4 2 (1.20%) TeamCity
5 1 (0.60%) Bitbucket
5 1 (0.60%) JIRA
5 1 (0.60%) Maven
General
1 59 (35.54%) Social Skills
2 52 (31.33%) Analytical Skills
3 44 (26.51%) Finance
4 26 (15.66%) Public Sector
5 13 (7.83%) Marketing
6 12 (7.23%) Pharmaceutical
7 10 (6.02%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 9 (5.42%) Banking
9 6 (3.61%) Organisational Skills
10 3 (1.81%) Manufacturing
10 3 (1.81%) Telecoms
11 2 (1.20%) Documentation Skills
11 2 (1.20%) Financial Institution
11 2 (1.20%) Influencing Skills
11 2 (1.20%) Presentation Skills
11 2 (1.20%) Social Science
12 1 (0.60%) Agriculture
12 1 (0.60%) Agrochemical
12 1 (0.60%) Local Government
12 1 (0.60%) Retail
Job Titles
1 52 (31.33%) Data Scientist
2 31 (18.67%) Analyst
3 24 (14.46%) Data Analyst
3 24 (14.46%) Senior
4 17 (10.24%) Data Engineer
5 15 (9.04%) Developer
5 15 (9.04%) Senior Data Scientist
6 13 (7.83%) Architect
7 10 (6.02%) Lead
8 8 (4.82%) Software Engineer
9 7 (4.22%) Business Intelligence Developer
10 6 (3.61%) Power BI Developer
11 5 (3.01%) Azure Engineer
11 5 (3.01%) Business Analyst
11 5 (3.01%) Lead Data Scientist
12 4 (2.41%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 4 (2.41%) Consultant
12 4 (2.41%) Data Analytics Engineer
13 3 (1.81%) Senior Data Engineer
13 3 (1.81%) SQL Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 13 (7.83%) TensorFlow
2 10 (6.02%) PyTorch
2 10 (6.02%) scikit-learn
3 9 (5.42%) Pandas
4 8 (4.82%) PySpark
5 6 (3.61%) Kafka
6 5 (3.01%) Keras
6 5 (3.01%) YAML
7 4 (2.41%) LangChain
8 3 (1.81%) FastAPI
8 3 (1.81%) Hugging Face
8 3 (1.81%) JSON
8 3 (1.81%) Matplotlib
8 3 (1.81%) Seaborn
8 3 (1.81%) Shiny
9 2 (1.20%) NumPy
9 2 (1.20%) REST
9 2 (1.20%) SciPy
9 2 (1.20%) XGBoost
9 2 (1.20%) XML
Miscellaneous
1 14 (8.43%) Algorithms
2 12 (7.23%) Credit Risk
3 8 (4.82%) Cloud Native
4 7 (4.22%) Data Structures
5 5 (3.01%) Product Ownership
5 5 (3.01%) Self-Motivation
6 3 (1.81%) Hybrid Cloud
6 3 (1.81%) IoT
6 3 (1.81%) Management Information System
6 3 (1.81%) Multi-touch
6 3 (1.81%) NHS
7 2 (1.20%) AI Agents
7 2 (1.20%) CRISPR
7 2 (1.20%) Genomics
7 2 (1.20%) Mobile App
7 2 (1.20%) Onboarding
8 1 (0.60%) Data Fabric
8 1 (0.60%) Distributed Computing
8 1 (0.60%) Legacy Systems
8 1 (0.60%) Private Cloud
Operating Systems
1 2 (1.20%) Linux
2 1 (0.60%) Unix
2 1 (0.60%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 94 (56.63%) Data Science
2 90 (54.22%) Analytics
3 74 (44.58%) Machine Learning
4 68 (40.96%) Visualisation
5 57 (34.34%) Business Intelligence
6 47 (28.31%) Decision-Making
7 41 (24.70%) Data Analysis
8 38 (22.89%) Problem-Solving
9 36 (21.69%) Statistical Modelling
10 35 (21.08%) Data Visualisation
11 34 (20.48%) Agile
11 34 (20.48%) Data Modelling
12 33 (19.88%) Actionable Insight
13 32 (19.28%) Data Governance
14 30 (18.07%) Data Pipeline
15 27 (16.27%) AI
16 24 (14.46%) Dashboard Development
16 24 (14.46%) Data Analytics
16 24 (14.46%) Validation
17 21 (12.65%) Statistics
Programming Languages
1 156 (93.98%) Python
2 117 (70.48%) SQL
3 12 (7.23%) Java
4 9 (5.42%) Data Analysis Expressions
5 7 (4.22%) C++
5 7 (4.22%) Scala
6 6 (3.61%) JavaScript
7 3 (1.81%) C#
7 3 (1.81%) TypeScript
8 2 (1.20%) Ada
8 2 (1.20%) Go
8 2 (1.20%) PL/SQL
8 2 (1.20%) Rust
8 2 (1.20%) VBA
9 1 (0.60%) Bash
9 1 (0.60%) LookML
9 1 (0.60%) MATLAB
9 1 (0.60%) SAS Macro
Qualifications
1 35 (21.08%) Security Cleared
2 32 (19.28%) Degree
3 28 (16.87%) SC Cleared
4 8 (4.82%) Computer Science Degree
5 7 (4.22%) Master's Degree
6 6 (3.61%) BPSS Clearance
7 5 (3.01%) PhD
8 4 (2.41%) Microsoft Certification
9 3 (1.81%) Azure Certification
10 1 (0.60%) CIMA
10 1 (0.60%) CTC Cleared
10 1 (0.60%) DBS Check
10 1 (0.60%) GIAC
10 1 (0.60%) Numerate Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 24 (14.46%) Data Quality
2 11 (6.63%) Actionable Recommendations
3 7 (4.22%) GDPR
3 7 (4.22%) QA
4 2 (1.20%) PCI DSS
5 1 (0.60%) Accessibility
5 1 (0.60%) MiFID
5 1 (0.60%) Sarbanes-Oxley
5 1 (0.60%) WCAG
System Software
1 8 (4.82%) Docker
2 2 (1.20%) HDFS
Systems Management
1 10 (6.02%) Kubernetes
2 2 (1.20%) rkt
2 2 (1.20%) Terraform
3 1 (0.60%) Ansible
3 1 (0.60%) Progress Chef
Vendors
1 22 (13.25%) Databricks
2 16 (9.64%) Microsoft
3 7 (4.22%) Amplitude
3 7 (4.22%) Pega
4 6 (3.61%) Oracle
5 4 (2.41%) OpenAI
5 4 (2.41%) SAP
5 4 (2.41%) ServiceNow
6 3 (1.81%) Informatica
6 3 (1.81%) Red Hat
6 3 (1.81%) Splunk
7 2 (1.20%) Cognos
7 2 (1.20%) Dynatrace
7 2 (1.20%) Google
7 2 (1.20%) TIBCO
8 1 (0.60%) Arqiva
8 1 (0.60%) Cribl.io
8 1 (0.60%) Instagram
8 1 (0.60%) TikTok
8 1 (0.60%) UiPath