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 17 January 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
17 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 410 324 376
Rank change year-on-year -86 +52 +43
Contract jobs citing R 172 206 232
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.46% 0.65% 0.54%
As % of the Programming Languages category 1.50% 1.96% 1.77%
Number of daily rates quoted 107 112 166
10th Percentile £281 £310 £320
25th Percentile £400 £380 £395
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £492 £515 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.47% -1.90% -4.55%
75th Percentile £597 £641 £638
90th Percentile £688 £800 £763
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £450
% change year-on-year +5.26% +5.56% +5.88%
Number of hourly rates quoted 6 9 14
10th Percentile £21.67 £21.02 £25.42
25th Percentile £23.43 £21.25 £28.43
Median hourly rate £26.46 £28.50 £40.32
Median % change year-on-year -7.17% -29.31% +55.06%
75th Percentile £29.69 £53.75 £48.44
90th Percentile £31.88 £55.15 £49.63
UK excluding London median hourly rate £25.42 £22.50 £47.50
% change year-on-year +12.96% -52.63% +122.85%

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 11,476 10,497 13,085
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 30.76% 33.00% 30.23%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,619 6,661 9,247
10th Percentile £350 £353 £350
25th Percentile £413 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £505 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -3.81% -4.55% -3.13%
75th Percentile £617 £640 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £482 £490 £500
% change year-on-year -1.63% -2.00% -2.44%
Number of hourly rates quoted 409 247 443
10th Percentile £35.20 £21.25 £35.50
25th Percentile £52.00 £35.38 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £61.84
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +1.07% -1.84%
75th Percentile £68.75 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £85.00 £78.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +3.17% -3.08% -

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 17 January 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
Top 14 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 17 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 -81 155 £500 -4.76% 223
London -34 81 £505 -8.18% 69
UK excluding London -59 68 £500 +5.26% 208
Work from Home +3 57 £510 -0.49% 39
South East -13 20 £600 +17.07% 65
Midlands -35 19 £435 +22.19% 23
North of England -57 14 £479 +34.41% 53
North West -19 12 £492 +38.20% 27
East Midlands -24 12 £385 +20.88% 14
East of England -19 8 £641 -1.38% 26
West Midlands -37 7 £475 - 9
Wales +2 5 £366 - 11
South West -24 2 - - 18
Yorkshire -49 2 £450 +20.00% 16

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 22 (12.79%) Apache Spark
2 17 (9.88%) SAS
3 8 (4.65%) SharePoint
4 5 (2.91%) Apache Airflow
5 4 (2.33%) Apache
6 3 (1.74%) Confluence
7 1 (0.58%) Jupyter
Applications
1 22 (12.79%) Microsoft Excel
2 9 (5.23%) Microsoft Office
2 9 (5.23%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 1 (0.58%) Chatbot
3 1 (0.58%) ProjectWise
Business Applications
1 1 (0.58%) Distributed Ledger
1 1 (0.58%) Salesforce CRM
1 1 (0.58%) SAP ERP
1 1 (0.58%) SAP IBP
1 1 (0.58%) SAP S/4HANA
1 1 (0.58%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 66 (38.37%) Power Platform
2 53 (30.81%) Azure
3 36 (20.93%) AWS
4 25 (14.53%) GCP
5 9 (5.23%) Power Automate
5 9 (5.23%) PowerApps
5 9 (5.23%) Snowflake
6 8 (4.65%) Azure Synapse Analytics
7 7 (4.07%) Azure Data Factory
7 7 (4.07%) Azure Machine Learning
8 5 (2.91%) Azure DevOps
8 5 (2.91%) Microsoft Purview
9 4 (2.33%) Azure AKS
10 3 (1.74%) Amazon Bedrock
10 3 (1.74%) Copilot Studio
10 3 (1.74%) dbt
11 2 (1.16%) Adobe Analytics
11 2 (1.16%) Amazon Kinesis
11 2 (1.16%) AWS Lambda
11 2 (1.16%) Serverless
Communications & Networking
1 2 (1.16%) 2G
1 2 (1.16%) 5G
1 2 (1.16%) LTE
1 2 (1.16%) Mobile Backhaul
1 2 (1.16%) VoIP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 66 (38.37%) Power BI
2 46 (26.74%) Tableau
3 21 (12.21%) Big Data
3 21 (12.21%) Data Warehouse
4 15 (8.72%) Hadoop
5 12 (6.98%) Data Lake
6 8 (4.65%) Data Mining
6 8 (4.65%) Looker
6 8 (4.65%) NoSQL
6 8 (4.65%) Power Query
7 7 (4.07%) Delta Lake
7 7 (4.07%) Metadata
8 6 (3.49%) Amazon Redshift
8 6 (3.49%) Relational Database
8 6 (3.49%) Spark SQL
9 5 (2.91%) SQL Server
10 3 (1.74%) BigQuery
10 3 (1.74%) Enterprise Data Warehouse
10 3 (1.74%) Impala
10 3 (1.74%) Spotfire
Development Applications
1 13 (7.56%) Git
2 6 (3.49%) Jenkins
3 4 (2.33%) JIRA
3 4 (2.33%) MLflow
4 2 (1.16%) GoCD
4 2 (1.16%) SonarQube
4 2 (1.16%) Sonatype Nexus
4 2 (1.16%) TeamCity
5 1 (0.58%) Bitbucket
5 1 (0.58%) Maven
5 1 (0.58%) RStudio
General
1 61 (35.47%) Social Skills
2 53 (30.81%) Analytical Skills
3 45 (26.16%) Finance
4 18 (10.47%) Marketing
5 16 (9.30%) Public Sector
6 14 (8.14%) Pharmaceutical
7 13 (7.56%) Banking
8 6 (3.49%) Organisational Skills
9 5 (2.91%) Manufacturing
10 3 (1.74%) Documentation Skills
10 3 (1.74%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 3 (1.74%) Legal
11 2 (1.16%) Digital Health
11 2 (1.16%) Influencing Skills
11 2 (1.16%) Local Government
11 2 (1.16%) Presentation Skills
11 2 (1.16%) Retail
11 2 (1.16%) Telecoms
12 1 (0.58%) Corporate Banking
12 1 (0.58%) Retail Banking
Job Titles
1 42 (24.42%) Data Scientist
2 34 (19.77%) Analyst
3 25 (14.53%) Data Analyst
4 21 (12.21%) Senior
5 18 (10.47%) Data Engineer
6 16 (9.30%) Developer
7 11 (6.40%) Architect
8 9 (5.23%) Lead
9 8 (4.65%) Senior Data Scientist
9 8 (4.65%) Software Engineer
10 7 (4.07%) Business Intelligence Developer
11 6 (3.49%) Azure Engineer
11 6 (3.49%) Consultant
11 6 (3.49%) Power BI Developer
12 5 (2.91%) Business Analyst
13 4 (2.33%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 4 (2.33%) Machine Learning Engineer
13 4 (2.33%) Senior Analyst
13 4 (2.33%) SQL Analyst
13 4 (2.33%) SQL Data Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 13 (7.56%) TensorFlow
2 11 (6.40%) scikit-learn
3 10 (5.81%) Pandas
3 10 (5.81%) PyTorch
4 9 (5.23%) PySpark
5 6 (3.49%) Kafka
6 5 (2.91%) YAML
7 4 (2.33%) Keras
7 4 (2.33%) LangChain
8 3 (1.74%) FastAPI
8 3 (1.74%) FHIR
8 3 (1.74%) Hugging Face
8 3 (1.74%) JSON
8 3 (1.74%) Shiny
9 2 (1.16%) Matplotlib
9 2 (1.16%) Node.js
9 2 (1.16%) NumPy
9 2 (1.16%) REST
9 2 (1.16%) SciPy
9 2 (1.16%) XML
Miscellaneous
1 12 (6.98%) Algorithms
1 12 (6.98%) Credit Risk
2 9 (5.23%) Self-Motivation
3 7 (4.07%) Data Structures
4 6 (3.49%) Cloud Native
5 5 (2.91%) Management Information System
5 5 (2.91%) Product Ownership
6 4 (2.33%) NHS
7 3 (1.74%) Analytical Mindset
7 3 (1.74%) IoT
7 3 (1.74%) Multi-touch
8 2 (1.16%) AI Agents
8 2 (1.16%) Distributed Computing
8 2 (1.16%) Genomics
8 2 (1.16%) Hybrid Cloud
8 2 (1.16%) Mobile App
8 2 (1.16%) Onboarding
9 1 (0.58%) Augmented Reality
9 1 (0.58%) CUDA
9 1 (0.58%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
Operating Systems
1 3 (1.74%) Linux
2 1 (0.58%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 84 (48.84%) Data Science
2 81 (47.09%) Analytics
3 69 (40.12%) Business Intelligence
4 66 (38.37%) Machine Learning
5 60 (34.88%) Visualisation
6 44 (25.58%) Decision-Making
7 43 (25.00%) Data Analysis
8 42 (24.42%) Data Modelling
9 40 (23.26%) Problem-Solving
10 35 (20.35%) Agile
11 33 (19.19%) Data Visualisation
12 32 (18.60%) Actionable Insight
12 32 (18.60%) Statistical Modelling
13 30 (17.44%) Data Governance
14 27 (15.70%) AI
14 27 (15.70%) Validation
15 25 (14.53%) CI/CD
16 21 (12.21%) Data Analytics
17 20 (11.63%) Data Pipeline
17 20 (11.63%) Stakeholder Management
Programming Languages
1 163 (94.77%) Python
2 120 (69.77%) SQL
3 14 (8.14%) Java
4 11 (6.40%) C++
5 9 (5.23%) Data Analysis Expressions
5 9 (5.23%) Scala
6 8 (4.65%) MATLAB
7 6 (3.49%) JavaScript
8 4 (2.33%) PL/SQL
8 4 (2.33%) VBA
9 3 (1.74%) Go
10 2 (1.16%) Ada
10 2 (1.16%) C#
10 2 (1.16%) Rust
10 2 (1.16%) TypeScript
11 1 (0.58%) Bash
11 1 (0.58%) Fortran
11 1 (0.58%) Korn
11 1 (0.58%) PowerShell
11 1 (0.58%) SAS Macro
Qualifications
1 30 (17.44%) Degree
2 23 (13.37%) Security Cleared
3 17 (9.88%) SC Cleared
4 12 (6.98%) Computer Science Degree
5 7 (4.07%) BPSS Clearance
5 7 (4.07%) Master's Degree
6 4 (2.33%) Microsoft Certification
6 4 (2.33%) PhD
7 3 (1.74%) Azure Certification
8 2 (1.16%) MCP
8 2 (1.16%) Tableau Certification
9 1 (0.58%) ACCA
9 1 (0.58%) CFA
9 1 (0.58%) CIMA
9 1 (0.58%) CTC Cleared
9 1 (0.58%) DBS Check
9 1 (0.58%) GIAC
9 1 (0.58%) Numerate Degree
9 1 (0.58%) Postgraduate
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 26 (15.12%) Data Quality
2 6 (3.49%) GDPR
2 6 (3.49%) QA
3 4 (2.33%) Actionable Recommendations
4 2 (1.16%) Accessibility
4 2 (1.16%) DICOM
4 2 (1.16%) PCI DSS
5 1 (0.58%) HL7
5 1 (0.58%) IFRS
5 1 (0.58%) IFRS 9
5 1 (0.58%) LOINC
5 1 (0.58%) Sarbanes-Oxley
5 1 (0.58%) SNOMED CT
5 1 (0.58%) WCAG
System Software
1 11 (6.40%) Docker
2 2 (1.16%) HDFS
3 1 (0.58%) Lustre
3 1 (0.58%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 12 (6.98%) Kubernetes
2 2 (1.16%) Ansible
2 2 (1.16%) rkt
2 2 (1.16%) Terraform
3 1 (0.58%) Packer
3 1 (0.58%) Progress Chef
Vendors
1 26 (15.12%) Databricks
2 21 (12.21%) Microsoft
3 9 (5.23%) Oracle
4 7 (4.07%) Pega
5 5 (2.91%) Google
6 4 (2.33%) OpenAI
6 4 (2.33%) SAP
7 3 (1.74%) Cognos
7 3 (1.74%) Informatica
7 3 (1.74%) ServiceNow
7 3 (1.74%) Splunk
7 3 (1.74%) TIBCO
8 2 (1.16%) Adobe
8 2 (1.16%) Alteryx
8 2 (1.16%) Amplitude
8 2 (1.16%) Dynatrace
8 2 (1.16%) Red Hat
9 1 (0.58%) Arqiva
9 1 (0.58%) Cribl.io
9 1 (0.58%) TikTok