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 6 April 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
6 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 453 364 391
Rank change year-on-year -89 +27 +49
Contract jobs citing R 172 168 214
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.38% 0.57% 0.49%
As % of the Programming Languages category 1.34% 1.69% 1.67%
Number of daily rates quoted 116 116 148
10th Percentile £331 £328 £314
25th Percentile £406 £406 £388
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £510 £525 £540
Median % change year-on-year -2.86% -2.78% -1.82%
75th Percentile £575 £675 £638
90th Percentile £650 £787 £763
UK excluding London median daily rate £450 £461 £413
% change year-on-year -2.44% +11.82% -4.35%
Number of hourly rates quoted 5 7 13
10th Percentile £22.38 £22.00 £25.36
25th Percentile £25.21 £22.75 £25.50
Median hourly rate £43.00 £26.32 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +63.37% -38.07% -34.62%
75th Percentile £60.25 £56.25 £52.50
90th Percentile £60.37 £59.55 £72.93
UK excluding London median hourly rate £25.42 £23.00 £25.36
% change year-on-year +10.50% -9.31% -15.47%

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 12,830 9,923 12,821
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 28.37% 33.93% 29.22%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,549 6,676 9,095
10th Percentile £355 £356 £350
25th Percentile £413 £415 £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 £763 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £476 £478 £488
% change year-on-year -0.42% -1.95% -2.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 533 243 478
10th Percentile £41.66 £22.27 £30.63
25th Percentile £54.55 £32.51 £46.18
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +4.17% -4.00%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.25 £67.29
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £74.61
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £64.00 £60.50
% change year-on-year +1.56% +5.79% -3.20%

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 6 April 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 6 April 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 6 April 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 -106 151 £510 -2.86% 187
London -51 86 £525 -4.55% 62
Work from Home -6 66 £531 +9.95% 40
UK excluding London -111 61 £450 -2.44% 154
South East -51 17 £588 +48.26% 39
North of England -65 14 £475 +4.40% 34
Midlands -68 14 £395 -3.54% 23
East Midlands -28 9 £385 +31.40% 15
North West -36 9 £530 +16.51% 14
South West -26 8 £450 -5.26% 22
East of England -37 7 £413 -36.54% 21
West Midlands -61 5 £438 +1.39% 8
Yorkshire -50 4 £425 +21.43% 13
Wales -12 1 £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 (19.77%) Apache Spark
2 11 (6.40%) Apache
3 7 (4.07%) SAS
4 5 (2.91%) SharePoint
5 4 (2.33%) Apache Superset
6 2 (1.16%) Apache Airflow
6 2 (1.16%) Jupyter
7 1 (0.58%) Confluence
7 1 (0.58%) R Markdown
Applications
1 15 (8.72%) Microsoft Excel
2 2 (1.16%) Microsoft Office
3 1 (0.58%) Chatbot
3 1 (0.58%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 2 (1.16%) SAP IBP
2 1 (0.58%) Salesforce CRM
2 1 (0.58%) SAP APO
2 1 (0.58%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 62 (36.05%) Power Platform
2 50 (29.07%) AWS
3 46 (26.74%) Azure
4 19 (11.05%) GCP
5 8 (4.65%) Power Automate
5 8 (4.65%) PowerApps
6 7 (4.07%) Snowflake
7 6 (3.49%) Azure Data Factory
8 5 (2.91%) Azure DevOps
8 5 (2.91%) Microsoft Purview
9 3 (1.74%) Amazon Bedrock
9 3 (1.74%) Azure Synapse Analytics
9 3 (1.74%) Copilot Studio
9 3 (1.74%) dbt
9 3 (1.74%) OpenShift
10 2 (1.16%) Amazon EMR
10 2 (1.16%) Amazon Kinesis
10 2 (1.16%) Amazon SageMaker
10 2 (1.16%) Azure Machine Learning
10 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 62 (36.05%) Power BI
2 48 (27.91%) Tableau
3 33 (19.19%) Big Data
4 24 (13.95%) Hadoop
5 21 (12.21%) Data Warehouse
6 11 (6.40%) Looker
7 8 (4.65%) Power Query
8 7 (4.07%) Delta Lake
8 7 (4.07%) Metadata
8 7 (4.07%) Mixpanel
8 7 (4.07%) Relational Database
8 7 (4.07%) Spark SQL
9 6 (3.49%) Data Lake
10 5 (2.91%) Amazon Redshift
10 5 (2.91%) SQL Server
11 4 (2.33%) Data Mining
11 4 (2.33%) NoSQL
12 3 (1.74%) Amazon Athena
13 2 (1.16%) Pinecone
13 2 (1.16%) Weaviate
Development Applications
1 11 (6.40%) Git
2 4 (2.33%) Jenkins
3 2 (1.16%) MLflow
3 2 (1.16%) RStudio
4 1 (0.58%) Bitbucket
4 1 (0.58%) JIRA
4 1 (0.58%) Maven
General
1 53 (30.81%) Analytical Skills
2 51 (29.65%) Social Skills
3 36 (20.93%) Finance
4 32 (18.60%) Public Sector
5 12 (6.98%) Pharmaceutical
6 10 (5.81%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 10 (5.81%) Marketing
7 7 (4.07%) Telecoms
8 4 (2.33%) Banking
9 3 (1.74%) Influencing Skills
9 3 (1.74%) Presentation Skills
10 2 (1.16%) Documentation Skills
10 2 (1.16%) Financial Institution
10 2 (1.16%) Retail
10 2 (1.16%) Social Science
11 1 (0.58%) Billing
11 1 (0.58%) Front Office
11 1 (0.58%) Local Government
11 1 (0.58%) Manufacturing
11 1 (0.58%) Private Banking
Job Titles
1 52 (30.23%) Data Scientist
2 31 (18.02%) Analyst
3 27 (15.70%) Data Analyst
3 27 (15.70%) Senior
4 18 (10.47%) Data Engineer
5 17 (9.88%) Developer
6 16 (9.30%) Senior Data Scientist
7 11 (6.40%) Lead
8 10 (5.81%) Architect
9 7 (4.07%) Consultant
10 6 (3.49%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
10 6 (3.49%) Business Intelligence Developer
10 6 (3.49%) Lead Data Scientist
11 5 (2.91%) Azure Engineer
11 5 (2.91%) Java Developer
11 5 (2.91%) Power BI Developer
11 5 (2.91%) Senior Analyst
11 5 (2.91%) Software Engineer
12 4 (2.33%) Business Analyst
12 4 (2.33%) Senior Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 13 (7.56%) TensorFlow
2 10 (5.81%) Pandas
2 10 (5.81%) PyTorch
3 9 (5.23%) PySpark
3 9 (5.23%) scikit-learn
4 8 (4.65%) JSON
5 6 (3.49%) Keras
5 6 (3.49%) Shiny
6 5 (2.91%) YAML
7 4 (2.33%) LangChain
7 4 (2.33%) Matplotlib
7 4 (2.33%) NumPy
7 4 (2.33%) Seaborn
8 3 (1.74%) FastAPI
8 3 (1.74%) Hugging Face
8 3 (1.74%) Kafka
8 3 (1.74%) Plotly
9 2 (1.16%) Node.js
9 2 (1.16%) SciPy
9 2 (1.16%) XGBoost
Miscellaneous
1 16 (9.30%) Algorithms
2 8 (4.65%) Cloud Native
3 7 (4.07%) CRISPR
3 7 (4.07%) Product Ownership
4 5 (2.91%) Credit Risk
4 5 (2.91%) Self-Motivation
5 4 (2.33%) Data Structures
6 3 (1.74%) AI Agents
6 3 (1.74%) Data Protection Act
6 3 (1.74%) Hybrid Cloud
6 3 (1.74%) Management Information System
6 3 (1.74%) Multi-touch
6 3 (1.74%) Onboarding
7 2 (1.16%) Analytical Mindset
7 2 (1.16%) Distributed Computing
7 2 (1.16%) Distributed Systems
7 2 (1.16%) IoT
7 2 (1.16%) Mainframe
8 1 (0.58%) Data Fabric
8 1 (0.58%) Legacy Systems
Operating Systems
1 3 (1.74%) Linux
2 2 (1.16%) Unix
3 1 (0.58%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 92 (53.49%) Analytics
2 91 (52.91%) Data Science
3 73 (42.44%) Visualisation
4 69 (40.12%) Machine Learning
5 62 (36.05%) Business Intelligence
6 49 (28.49%) Decision-Making
7 41 (23.84%) Data Pipeline
8 40 (23.26%) Data Visualisation
9 39 (22.67%) Problem-Solving
10 38 (22.09%) Actionable Insight
11 37 (21.51%) Data Analysis
12 36 (20.93%) Data Modelling
12 36 (20.93%) Statistical Modelling
13 34 (19.77%) Agile
14 32 (18.60%) AI
15 31 (18.02%) Data Analytics
16 30 (17.44%) Data Governance
17 26 (15.12%) Statistics
18 25 (14.53%) Dashboard Development
18 25 (14.53%) Validation
Programming Languages
1 163 (94.77%) Python
2 126 (73.26%) SQL
3 12 (6.98%) Java
4 10 (5.81%) Data Analysis Expressions
5 7 (4.07%) JavaScript
6 6 (3.49%) C++
6 6 (3.49%) Scala
7 5 (2.91%) C#
8 3 (1.74%) TypeScript
9 2 (1.16%) Ada
9 2 (1.16%) VBA
10 1 (0.58%) LookML
10 1 (0.58%) SAS Macro
Qualifications
1 46 (26.74%) Security Cleared
2 39 (22.67%) SC Cleared
3 32 (18.60%) Degree
4 8 (4.65%) Computer Science Degree
5 6 (3.49%) Master's Degree
5 6 (3.49%) Microsoft Certification
6 5 (2.91%) PhD
7 4 (2.33%) BPSS Clearance
8 3 (1.74%) Azure Certification
9 2 (1.16%) Tableau Certification
10 1 (0.58%) CIMA
10 1 (0.58%) CTC Cleared
10 1 (0.58%) DBS Check
10 1 (0.58%) DV Cleared
10 1 (0.58%) Numerate Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 23 (13.37%) Data Quality
2 11 (6.40%) Actionable Recommendations
3 9 (5.23%) QA
4 7 (4.07%) GDPR
5 3 (1.74%) Accessibility
6 2 (1.16%) PCI DSS
6 2 (1.16%) WCAG
7 1 (0.58%) MiFID
7 1 (0.58%) Sarbanes-Oxley
System Software
1 5 (2.91%) Docker
2 2 (1.16%) HDFS
Systems Management
1 9 (5.23%) Kubernetes
2 4 (2.33%) Terraform
3 1 (0.58%) Progress Chef
Vendors
1 22 (12.79%) Databricks
2 17 (9.88%) Microsoft
3 7 (4.07%) Amplitude
4 5 (2.91%) OpenAI
4 5 (2.91%) Pega
5 4 (2.33%) ServiceNow
6 3 (1.74%) Google
6 3 (1.74%) Informatica
6 3 (1.74%) Oracle
6 3 (1.74%) Red Hat
6 3 (1.74%) SAP
7 2 (1.16%) Splunk
8 1 (0.58%) Adobe
8 1 (0.58%) Alteryx
8 1 (0.58%) Arqiva
8 1 (0.58%) Cognos
8 1 (0.58%) Salesforce
8 1 (0.58%) UiPath