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 8 July 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
8 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 493 369 402
Rank change year-on-year -124 +33 +16
Contract jobs citing R 173 179 200
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.33% 0.56% 0.46%
As % of the Programming Languages category 1.23% 1.67% 1.51%
Number of daily rates quoted 120 114 123
10th Percentile £298 £325 £310
25th Percentile £406 £406 £363
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £481 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year -3.75% - -16.67%
75th Percentile £575 £600 £605
90th Percentile £681 £725 £685
UK excluding London median daily rate £437 £494 £550
% change year-on-year -11.44% -10.23% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 4 5 19
10th Percentile £27.93 £24.33 £20.09
25th Percentile £33.44 £26.32 £20.12
Median hourly rate £50.75 £37.50 £21.50
Median % change year-on-year +35.33% +74.42% -67.42%
75th Percentile £60.30 £58.75 £45.63
90th Percentile £60.40 £61.75 £59.23
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.00 £23.00 £20.24
% change year-on-year +86.96% +13.66% -68.87%

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 14,047 10,718 13,269
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.92% 33.55% 30.77%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,125 7,225 9,322
10th Percentile £360 £350 £350
25th Percentile £420 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £512 £512 £525
Median % change year-on-year -0.04% -2.48% -4.55%
75th Percentile £606 £625 £650
90th Percentile £720 £750 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £492 £475 £490
% change year-on-year +3.58% -3.06% -2.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 536 254 532
10th Percentile £34.01 £27.12 £31.25
25th Percentile £53.46 £35.00 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -12.00% -
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £79.00 £78.34 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year +4.00% -3.85% +4.00%

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 8 July 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 8 July 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for R in the UK

R
Top 17 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 8 July 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 -116 152 £475 -5.94% 214
London -64 92 £525 -2.78% 107
Work from Home -44 62 £550 +12.24% 71
UK excluding London -123 57 £437 -11.44% 159
South East -66 14 £550 +24.29% 56
South West -35 12 £450 -34.66% 13
North of England -73 12 £425 -9.81% 40
East of England -36 10 £413 -28.26% 19
Yorkshire -34 9 £425 +1.49% 16
Midlands -66 5 £438 -2.45% 18
West Midlands -64 3 £451 +7.58% 5
Northern Ireland +6 2 £363 +3.57% 3
East Midlands -13 2 £252 -43.51% 13
North West -50 2 - - 19
Scotland -14 1 - - 7
Wales -18 1 £490 +10.11% 4
North East - 1 £475 - 5

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 (17.34%) Apache Spark
2 11 (6.36%) Apache
3 4 (2.31%) Apache Superset
3 4 (2.31%) Confluence
4 2 (1.16%) Jupyter
5 1 (0.58%) R Markdown
5 1 (0.58%) SAS
Applications
1 20 (11.56%) Microsoft Excel
2 2 (1.16%) Spreadsheet
3 1 (0.58%) Chatbot
3 1 (0.58%) CPLEX
3 1 (0.58%) SPSS
Business Applications
1 1 (0.58%) SAP APO
1 1 (0.58%) SAP IBP
Cloud Services
1 55 (31.79%) Power Platform
2 50 (28.90%) AWS
3 44 (25.43%) Azure
4 14 (8.09%) GCP
4 14 (8.09%) Snowflake
5 6 (3.47%) Azure DevOps
6 4 (2.31%) Azure Data Factory
6 4 (2.31%) Azure Synapse Analytics
6 4 (2.31%) SaaS
7 3 (1.73%) Amazon EKS
7 3 (1.73%) Amazon S3
7 3 (1.73%) dbt
7 3 (1.73%) GitHub
7 3 (1.73%) Serverless
8 2 (1.16%) Cloud Functions
8 2 (1.16%) Google Analytics
9 1 (0.58%) Cloud Computing
9 1 (0.58%) Google Data Studio
9 1 (0.58%) OpenShift
9 1 (0.58%) PaaS
Communications & Networking
1 2 (1.16%) DSL
Database & Business Intelligence
1 54 (31.21%) Power BI
2 53 (30.64%) Tableau
3 26 (15.03%) Big Data
4 18 (10.40%) Hadoop
5 15 (8.67%) Data Warehouse
6 10 (5.78%) Relational Database
7 9 (5.20%) Looker
8 7 (4.05%) Mixpanel
9 4 (2.31%) Data Lake
9 4 (2.31%) NoSQL
9 4 (2.31%) Power Query
9 4 (2.31%) SQL Server
10 3 (1.73%) Amazon Athena
10 3 (1.73%) Apache Hive
10 3 (1.73%) BigQuery
10 3 (1.73%) Metadata
10 3 (1.73%) RDBMS
11 2 (1.16%) Amazon Redshift
11 2 (1.16%) Parquet
11 2 (1.16%) Spark SQL
Development Applications
1 5 (2.89%) Git
2 3 (1.73%) GitLab
2 3 (1.73%) JIRA
3 2 (1.16%) Jenkins
3 2 (1.16%) MLflow
4 1 (0.58%) RStudio
General
1 57 (32.95%) Analytical Skills
2 36 (20.81%) Social Skills
3 34 (19.65%) Public Sector
4 29 (16.76%) Finance
5 14 (8.09%) Pharmaceutical
6 11 (6.36%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 10 (5.78%) Marketing
8 7 (4.05%) Telecoms
9 5 (2.89%) Banking
9 5 (2.89%) Retail
10 4 (2.31%) Front Office
11 3 (1.73%) Influencing Skills
11 3 (1.73%) Presentation Skills
12 2 (1.16%) Manufacturing
12 2 (1.16%) Military
12 2 (1.16%) Police
12 2 (1.16%) Publishing
12 2 (1.16%) Social Science
13 1 (0.58%) Billing
13 1 (0.58%) Private Banking
Job Titles
1 49 (28.32%) Data Scientist
2 42 (24.28%) Analyst
3 33 (19.08%) Data Analyst
4 20 (11.56%) Senior
5 15 (8.67%) Data Engineer
6 14 (8.09%) Senior Data Scientist
7 13 (7.51%) Developer
8 11 (6.36%) Lead
9 9 (5.20%) Architect
9 9 (5.20%) Technical Analyst
10 8 (4.62%) SQL Analyst
11 7 (4.05%) Consultant
11 7 (4.05%) Lead Data Scientist
11 7 (4.05%) Software Engineer
11 7 (4.05%) SQL Data Analyst
12 6 (3.47%) Data Consultant
13 5 (2.89%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 5 (2.89%) Data Architect
13 5 (2.89%) Senior Analyst
13 5 (2.89%) Senior Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 12 (6.94%) PyTorch
1 12 (6.94%) TensorFlow
2 6 (3.47%) Pandas
3 5 (2.89%) JSON
3 5 (2.89%) Keras
4 4 (2.31%) XML
5 3 (1.73%) NumPy
5 3 (1.73%) scikit-learn
5 3 (1.73%) Shiny
5 3 (1.73%) YAML
6 2 (1.16%) AngularJS
6 2 (1.16%) Apache Avro
6 2 (1.16%) Faiss
6 2 (1.16%) Hugging Face
6 2 (1.16%) LangChain
6 2 (1.16%) Matplotlib
6 2 (1.16%) Model Context Protocol
6 2 (1.16%) pytest
6 2 (1.16%) React
6 2 (1.16%) WebSockets
Miscellaneous
1 17 (9.83%) Algorithms
2 11 (6.36%) CRISPR
3 6 (3.47%) Onboarding
4 5 (2.89%) Cloud Native
4 5 (2.89%) Data Protection Act
4 5 (2.89%) Product Ownership
5 4 (2.31%) AI Agents
5 4 (2.31%) Analytical Mindset
5 4 (2.31%) Legacy Systems
6 3 (1.73%) Mainframe
6 3 (1.73%) Multi-touch
7 2 (1.16%) BYOD
7 2 (1.16%) Credit Risk
7 2 (1.16%) Distributed Computing
7 2 (1.16%) Distributed Systems
7 2 (1.16%) Fixed Income
7 2 (1.16%) Taxonomies
8 1 (0.58%) Data Fabric
8 1 (0.58%) Hybrid Cloud
8 1 (0.58%) Virtual Reality
Operating Systems
1 4 (2.31%) Linux
2 3 (1.73%) Unix
Processes & Methodologies
1 85 (49.13%) Data Science
2 83 (47.98%) Analytics
3 77 (44.51%) Visualisation
4 64 (36.99%) Machine Learning
5 58 (33.53%) Data Pipeline
6 53 (30.64%) Business Intelligence
7 47 (27.17%) Actionable Insight
7 47 (27.17%) Decision-Making
8 42 (24.28%) Data Visualisation
9 41 (23.70%) AI
10 38 (21.97%) Problem-Solving
11 36 (20.81%) Statistical Modelling
12 33 (19.08%) Statistical Analysis
13 31 (17.92%) Agile
14 30 (17.34%) Mathematics
15 29 (16.76%) Statistics
16 28 (16.18%) Data Analytics
17 25 (14.45%) Validation
18 22 (12.72%) Data Analysis
18 22 (12.72%) Data Engineering
Programming Languages
1 164 (94.80%) Python
2 114 (65.90%) SQL
3 17 (9.83%) Java
4 9 (5.20%) C++
5 7 (4.05%) C#
6 5 (2.89%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 3 (1.73%) JavaScript
7 3 (1.73%) Scala
7 3 (1.73%) TypeScript
8 2 (1.16%) Cypher
8 2 (1.16%) SHACL
9 1 (0.58%) T-SQL
9 1 (0.58%) VB
Qualifications
1 44 (25.43%) Security Cleared
2 37 (21.39%) SC Cleared
3 30 (17.34%) Degree
4 5 (2.89%) PhD
5 4 (2.31%) BPSS Clearance
5 4 (2.31%) Computer Science Degree
5 4 (2.31%) Master's Degree
6 2 (1.16%) Microsoft Certification
6 2 (1.16%) Microsoft Certified Professional
6 2 (1.16%) Tableau Certification
7 1 (0.58%) Azure Certification
7 1 (0.58%) DV Cleared
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 14 (8.09%) Data Quality
2 9 (5.20%) Actionable Recommendations
2 9 (5.20%) QA
3 4 (2.31%) GDPR
4 3 (1.73%) Accessibility
5 2 (1.16%) California Consumer Privacy Act
6 1 (0.58%) MiFID
6 1 (0.58%) Sarbanes-Oxley
6 1 (0.58%) WCAG
System Software
1 2 (1.16%) Docker
Systems Management
1 9 (5.20%) Terraform
2 6 (3.47%) Kubernetes
3 2 (1.16%) Argo
3 2 (1.16%) Grafana
4 1 (0.58%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 15 (8.67%) Databricks
1 15 (8.67%) Microsoft
2 7 (4.05%) Amplitude
3 6 (3.47%) Google
4 5 (2.89%) OpenAI
5 2 (1.16%) FactSet
5 2 (1.16%) Splunk
6 1 (0.58%) Alteryx
6 1 (0.58%) Pega
6 1 (0.58%) Red Hat
6 1 (0.58%) SAP
6 1 (0.58%) ServiceNow
6 1 (0.58%) Sonatype