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 11 March 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
11 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 464 351 383
Rank change year-on-year -113 +32 +30
Contract jobs citing R 156 178 233
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.37% 0.60% 0.52%
As % of the Programming Languages category 1.25% 1.77% 1.79%
Number of daily rates quoted 98 110 163
10th Percentile £313 £348 £313
25th Percentile £413 £400 £388
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £506 £525
Median % change year-on-year +3.70% -3.57% -4.55%
75th Percentile £598 £675 £638
90th Percentile £688 £777 £763
UK excluding London median daily rate £484 £455 £400
% change year-on-year +6.26% +13.75% -8.57%
Number of hourly rates quoted 7 7 13
10th Percentile £23.32 £22.00 £25.36
25th Percentile £27.60 £22.75 £25.50
Median hourly rate £32.50 £26.32 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +23.48% -38.07% +41.67%
75th Percentile £54.88 £56.25 £47.50
90th Percentile £60.33 £59.55 £51.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £30.00 £23.00 £23.55
% change year-on-year +30.43% -2.31% +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 12,497 10,082 13,016
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 29.37% 34.20% 29.09%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,321 6,644 9,165
10th Percentile £352 £356 £350
25th Percentile £413 £420 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -5.70%
75th Percentile £600 £638 £650
90th Percentile £720 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £476 £490 £488
% change year-on-year -2.96% +0.51% -3.89%
Number of hourly rates quoted 486 242 512
10th Percentile £41.94 £21.33 £30.69
25th Percentile £54.55 £35.00 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +4.17% -5.51%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £67.50
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.75 £62.00
% change year-on-year +1.97% +2.81% -4.62%

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 11 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 11 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 11 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 -116 135 £525 +3.70% 318
London -48 80 £536 -2.55% 80
Work from Home -7 60 £543 +17.41% 52
UK excluding London -104 53 £484 +6.26% 299
Midlands -62 16 £395 +1.94% 49
South East -46 15 £600 +41.18% 77
North of England -61 13 £500 +9.89% 69
East Midlands -25 11 £385 +33.22% 33
North West -30 11 £513 +12.77% 24
West Midlands -62 5 £438 +12.90% 16
Wales -5 3 £425 - 17
South West -22 3 - - 31
East of England -34 3 £413 -36.54% 34
North East -13 1 £475 - 16
Yorkshire - 1 - - 31

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 30 (19.23%) Apache Spark
2 9 (5.77%) SAS
3 5 (3.21%) Apache
3 5 (3.21%) SharePoint
4 4 (2.56%) Apache Airflow
5 1 (0.64%) Apache Superset
5 1 (0.64%) Confluence
5 1 (0.64%) Jupyter
Applications
1 14 (8.97%) Microsoft Excel
2 4 (2.56%) Microsoft Office
3 2 (1.28%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 1 (0.64%) Salesforce CRM
1 1 (0.64%) SAP IBP
1 1 (0.64%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 58 (37.18%) Power Platform
2 48 (30.77%) AWS
3 43 (27.56%) Azure
4 21 (13.46%) GCP
5 9 (5.77%) Snowflake
6 8 (5.13%) Power Automate
6 8 (5.13%) PowerApps
7 5 (3.21%) Azure Data Factory
7 5 (3.21%) dbt
7 5 (3.21%) Microsoft Purview
8 4 (2.56%) Azure DevOps
9 3 (1.92%) Amazon Bedrock
9 3 (1.92%) Azure Synapse Analytics
9 3 (1.92%) Copilot Studio
9 3 (1.92%) OpenShift
10 2 (1.28%) Amazon EMR
10 2 (1.28%) Amazon Kinesis
10 2 (1.28%) Amazon SageMaker
10 2 (1.28%) Azure Machine Learning
10 2 (1.28%) Google Analytics
Communications & Networking
1 2 (1.28%) 2G
1 2 (1.28%) 5G
1 2 (1.28%) LTE
1 2 (1.28%) Mobile Backhaul
1 2 (1.28%) VoIP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 58 (37.18%) Power BI
2 43 (27.56%) Tableau
3 30 (19.23%) Big Data
4 24 (15.38%) Hadoop
5 19 (12.18%) Data Warehouse
6 13 (8.33%) Looker
7 7 (4.49%) Data Lake
7 7 (4.49%) Data Mining
7 7 (4.49%) Delta Lake
7 7 (4.49%) Metadata
7 7 (4.49%) Mixpanel
7 7 (4.49%) Power Query
8 6 (3.85%) NoSQL
8 6 (3.85%) Spark SQL
9 5 (3.21%) Amazon Redshift
9 5 (3.21%) Relational Database
10 3 (1.92%) BigQuery
10 3 (1.92%) SQL Server
11 2 (1.28%) Azure SQL Database
11 2 (1.28%) Weaviate
Development Applications
1 12 (7.69%) Git
2 6 (3.85%) Jenkins
3 2 (1.28%) GoCD
3 2 (1.28%) MLflow
3 2 (1.28%) RStudio
3 2 (1.28%) SonarQube
3 2 (1.28%) Sonatype Nexus
3 2 (1.28%) TeamCity
4 1 (0.64%) Bitbucket
4 1 (0.64%) JIRA
4 1 (0.64%) Maven
General
1 51 (32.69%) Social Skills
2 44 (28.21%) Analytical Skills
3 38 (24.36%) Finance
4 29 (18.59%) Public Sector
5 13 (8.33%) Marketing
6 12 (7.69%) Pharmaceutical
7 10 (6.41%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 7 (4.49%) Banking
9 3 (1.92%) Telecoms
10 2 (1.28%) Financial Institution
10 2 (1.28%) Influencing Skills
10 2 (1.28%) Manufacturing
10 2 (1.28%) Presentation Skills
10 2 (1.28%) Retail
10 2 (1.28%) Social Science
11 1 (0.64%) Documentation Skills
11 1 (0.64%) Local Government
11 1 (0.64%) Private Banking
11 1 (0.64%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 51 (32.69%) Data Scientist
2 29 (18.59%) Analyst
3 25 (16.03%) Senior
4 24 (15.38%) Data Analyst
5 18 (11.54%) Data Engineer
6 17 (10.90%) Senior Data Scientist
7 13 (8.33%) Architect
7 13 (8.33%) Developer
8 11 (7.05%) Lead
9 6 (3.85%) Business Intelligence Developer
9 6 (3.85%) Lead Data Scientist
10 5 (3.21%) Azure Engineer
10 5 (3.21%) Power BI Developer
11 4 (2.56%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
11 4 (2.56%) Business Analyst
11 4 (2.56%) Consultant
11 4 (2.56%) Data Analytics Engineer
11 4 (2.56%) Software Engineer
12 3 (1.92%) Senior Analyst
12 3 (1.92%) Solutions Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 13 (8.33%) TensorFlow
2 10 (6.41%) PyTorch
2 10 (6.41%) scikit-learn
3 9 (5.77%) Pandas
4 8 (5.13%) PySpark
5 6 (3.85%) Keras
6 5 (3.21%) Kafka
6 5 (3.21%) YAML
7 4 (2.56%) JSON
7 4 (2.56%) LangChain
7 4 (2.56%) Shiny
8 3 (1.92%) FastAPI
8 3 (1.92%) Hugging Face
8 3 (1.92%) Matplotlib
8 3 (1.92%) Seaborn
9 2 (1.28%) Faiss
9 2 (1.28%) Model Context Protocol
9 2 (1.28%) REST
9 2 (1.28%) SciPy
9 2 (1.28%) XML
Miscellaneous
1 15 (9.62%) Algorithms
2 8 (5.13%) Cloud Native
3 7 (4.49%) Credit Risk
3 7 (4.49%) Data Structures
4 6 (3.85%) Product Ownership
5 5 (3.21%) Self-Motivation
6 4 (2.56%) CRISPR
7 3 (1.92%) Hybrid Cloud
7 3 (1.92%) Management Information System
7 3 (1.92%) Multi-touch
8 2 (1.28%) AI Agents
8 2 (1.28%) IoT
8 2 (1.28%) Mobile App
8 2 (1.28%) Onboarding
9 1 (0.64%) Analytical Mindset
9 1 (0.64%) Data Fabric
9 1 (0.64%) Distributed Computing
9 1 (0.64%) Distributed Systems
9 1 (0.64%) Greenfield Project
9 1 (0.64%) Legacy Systems
Operating Systems
1 2 (1.28%) Linux
2 1 (0.64%) Unix
2 1 (0.64%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 90 (57.69%) Analytics
1 90 (57.69%) Data Science
2 71 (45.51%) Machine Learning
3 66 (42.31%) Visualisation
4 55 (35.26%) Business Intelligence
5 44 (28.21%) Decision-Making
6 40 (25.64%) Data Analysis
7 38 (24.36%) Statistical Modelling
8 36 (23.08%) Data Modelling
9 34 (21.79%) Data Visualisation
10 33 (21.15%) Actionable Insight
10 33 (21.15%) Data Pipeline
10 33 (21.15%) Problem-Solving
11 31 (19.87%) Data Governance
12 30 (19.23%) Agile
13 29 (18.59%) AI
14 25 (16.03%) Data Analytics
15 24 (15.38%) Dashboard Development
15 24 (15.38%) Validation
16 21 (13.46%) Statistics
Programming Languages
1 148 (94.87%) Python
2 112 (71.79%) SQL
3 9 (5.77%) Data Analysis Expressions
4 8 (5.13%) Java
5 7 (4.49%) Scala
6 6 (3.85%) JavaScript
7 5 (3.21%) C++
8 3 (1.92%) C#
8 3 (1.92%) TypeScript
9 2 (1.28%) Ada
9 2 (1.28%) Go
9 2 (1.28%) Rust
9 2 (1.28%) VBA
10 1 (0.64%) Bash
10 1 (0.64%) LookML
10 1 (0.64%) SAS Macro
Qualifications
1 37 (23.72%) Security Cleared
2 30 (19.23%) SC Cleared
3 29 (18.59%) Degree
4 7 (4.49%) Computer Science Degree
5 6 (3.85%) Master's Degree
6 5 (3.21%) Microsoft Certification
6 5 (3.21%) PhD
7 3 (1.92%) Azure Certification
7 3 (1.92%) BPSS Clearance
8 1 (0.64%) CIMA
8 1 (0.64%) CTC Cleared
8 1 (0.64%) DBS Check
8 1 (0.64%) GIAC
8 1 (0.64%) Numerate Degree
8 1 (0.64%) Tableau Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 24 (15.38%) Data Quality
2 11 (7.05%) Actionable Recommendations
3 7 (4.49%) GDPR
4 6 (3.85%) QA
5 2 (1.28%) Accessibility
5 2 (1.28%) PCI DSS
6 1 (0.64%) MiFID
6 1 (0.64%) Sarbanes-Oxley
6 1 (0.64%) WCAG
System Software
1 8 (5.13%) Docker
2 2 (1.28%) HDFS
Systems Management
1 12 (7.69%) Kubernetes
2 3 (1.92%) Terraform
3 2 (1.28%) rkt
4 1 (0.64%) Ansible
4 1 (0.64%) Progress Chef
Vendors
1 21 (13.46%) Databricks
2 16 (10.26%) Microsoft
3 7 (4.49%) Amplitude
3 7 (4.49%) Pega
4 4 (2.56%) OpenAI
4 4 (2.56%) ServiceNow
5 3 (1.92%) Informatica
5 3 (1.92%) Oracle
5 3 (1.92%) Red Hat
5 3 (1.92%) SAP
5 3 (1.92%) Splunk
6 2 (1.28%) Dynatrace
6 2 (1.28%) Google
6 2 (1.28%) TIBCO
7 1 (0.64%) Adobe
7 1 (0.64%) Alteryx
7 1 (0.64%) Arqiva
7 1 (0.64%) Cognos
7 1 (0.64%) Facebook
7 1 (0.64%) Salesforce