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 24 June 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
24 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 475 369 387
Rank change year-on-year -106 +18 +27
Contract jobs citing R 164 170 196
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.32% 0.57% 0.45%
As % of the Programming Languages category 1.20% 1.67% 1.49%
Number of daily rates quoted 117 113 123
10th Percentile £273 £325 £313
25th Percentile £406 £406 £375
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year -5.00% - -16.67%
75th Percentile £575 £600 £611
90th Percentile £677 £725 £763
UK excluding London median daily rate £438 £488 £488
% change year-on-year -10.26% - -9.30%
Number of hourly rates quoted 4 5 18
10th Percentile £27.93 £24.33 -
25th Percentile £33.44 £26.32 £20.12
Median hourly rate £50.75 £37.50 £21.62
Median % change year-on-year +35.33% +73.49% -68.21%
75th Percentile £60.30 £58.75 £46.56
90th Percentile £60.40 £61.75 £61.51
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 13,697 10,171 13,188
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.91% 33.87% 30.34%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,913 6,897 9,255
10th Percentile £358 £350 £350
25th Percentile £419 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £510 £510 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -2.86% -4.55%
75th Percentile £608 £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 555 239 553
10th Percentile £35.00 £25.65 £31.25
25th Percentile £53.53 £33.91 £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 £77.50 £83.27 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £61.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year +5.69% -5.38% +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 24 June 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 24 June 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for R in the UK

R
Top 16 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 24 June 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 -118 144 £469 -6.77% 202
London -63 90 £525 -2.78% 69
Work from Home -40 64 £550 +13.99% 30
UK excluding London -114 50 £438 -10.26% 186
South East -59 13 £550 +35.38% 50
North of England -73 12 £425 -9.81% 40
South West -31 11 £450 -34.66% 26
East of England -38 10 £413 -32.65% 30
Yorkshire -45 9 £425 +1.49% 15
North West -50 2 - - 19
Northern Ireland 0 1 - - 5
Wales -13 1 £490 +10.11% 8
Scotland -16 1 - - 8
Midlands -64 1 £438 -2.45% 21
West Midlands -64 1 £438 +4.48% 7
North East - 1 £475 - 6

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 31 (18.90%) Apache Spark
2 11 (6.71%) Apache
3 4 (2.44%) Apache Superset
4 3 (1.83%) Confluence
5 2 (1.22%) Jupyter
6 1 (0.61%) R Markdown
6 1 (0.61%) SAS
Applications
1 17 (10.37%) Microsoft Excel
2 2 (1.22%) Spreadsheet
3 1 (0.61%) Chatbot
3 1 (0.61%) CPLEX
3 1 (0.61%) SPSS
Business Applications
1 1 (0.61%) SAP APO
1 1 (0.61%) SAP IBP
Cloud Services
1 52 (31.71%) Power Platform
2 49 (29.88%) AWS
3 43 (26.22%) Azure
4 13 (7.93%) GCP
4 13 (7.93%) Snowflake
5 6 (3.66%) Azure DevOps
6 4 (2.44%) SaaS
7 3 (1.83%) Amazon S3
7 3 (1.83%) Azure Data Factory
7 3 (1.83%) Azure Synapse Analytics
7 3 (1.83%) dbt
7 3 (1.83%) GitHub
7 3 (1.83%) OpenShift
7 3 (1.83%) Serverless
8 2 (1.22%) Amazon EKS
8 2 (1.22%) Cloud Functions
8 2 (1.22%) Google Analytics
9 1 (0.61%) Amazon SageMaker
9 1 (0.61%) Google Data Studio
9 1 (0.61%) WhatsApp
Communications & Networking
1 1 (0.61%) DSL
Database & Business Intelligence
1 53 (32.32%) Tableau
2 51 (31.10%) Power BI
3 28 (17.07%) Big Data
4 20 (12.20%) Hadoop
5 16 (9.76%) Data Warehouse
6 9 (5.49%) Looker
6 9 (5.49%) Relational Database
7 7 (4.27%) Mixpanel
8 4 (2.44%) NoSQL
8 4 (2.44%) Power Query
8 4 (2.44%) SQL Server
9 3 (1.83%) Amazon Athena
9 3 (1.83%) Data Lake
9 3 (1.83%) Metadata
9 3 (1.83%) RDBMS
10 2 (1.22%) Amazon Redshift
10 2 (1.22%) BigQuery
10 2 (1.22%) Pinecone
10 2 (1.22%) Spark SQL
10 2 (1.22%) Weaviate
Development Applications
1 4 (2.44%) Git
2 2 (1.22%) GitLab
2 2 (1.22%) Jenkins
2 2 (1.22%) JIRA
2 2 (1.22%) MLflow
3 1 (0.61%) RStudio
General
1 56 (34.15%) Analytical Skills
2 34 (20.73%) Social Skills
3 31 (18.90%) Public Sector
4 29 (17.68%) Finance
5 14 (8.54%) Pharmaceutical
6 11 (6.71%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 8 (4.88%) Marketing
8 6 (3.66%) Telecoms
9 5 (3.05%) Banking
10 4 (2.44%) Retail
11 3 (1.83%) Front Office
11 3 (1.83%) Influencing Skills
11 3 (1.83%) Presentation Skills
12 2 (1.22%) Manufacturing
12 2 (1.22%) Publishing
12 2 (1.22%) Social Science
13 1 (0.61%) Billing
13 1 (0.61%) Financial Institution
13 1 (0.61%) Military
13 1 (0.61%) Private Banking
Job Titles
1 48 (29.27%) Data Scientist
2 42 (25.61%) Analyst
3 36 (21.95%) Data Analyst
4 20 (12.20%) Senior
5 14 (8.54%) Data Engineer
5 14 (8.54%) Senior Data Scientist
6 13 (7.93%) Developer
7 10 (6.10%) Lead
8 9 (5.49%) Technical Analyst
9 8 (4.88%) SQL Analyst
9 8 (4.88%) SQL Data Analyst
10 7 (4.27%) Architect
10 7 (4.27%) Consultant
10 7 (4.27%) Lead Data Scientist
11 6 (3.66%) Data Consultant
11 6 (3.66%) Software Engineer
12 5 (3.05%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 5 (3.05%) Java Developer
12 5 (3.05%) Senior Analyst
12 5 (3.05%) Senior Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 11 (6.71%) PyTorch
1 11 (6.71%) TensorFlow
2 6 (3.66%) Pandas
3 5 (3.05%) JSON
3 5 (3.05%) Keras
4 3 (1.83%) NumPy
4 3 (1.83%) scikit-learn
4 3 (1.83%) Shiny
5 2 (1.22%) Apache Avro
5 2 (1.22%) Apache Beam
5 2 (1.22%) Faiss
5 2 (1.22%) Hugging Face
5 2 (1.22%) LangChain
5 2 (1.22%) Matplotlib
5 2 (1.22%) Prophet
5 2 (1.22%) PySpark
5 2 (1.22%) Seaborn
5 2 (1.22%) YAML
6 1 (0.61%) Bootstrap
6 1 (0.61%) WebSockets
Miscellaneous
1 16 (9.76%) Algorithms
2 11 (6.71%) CRISPR
3 7 (4.27%) Cloud Native
4 5 (3.05%) Data Protection Act
4 5 (3.05%) Product Ownership
5 4 (2.44%) Analytical Mindset
5 4 (2.44%) Legacy Systems
5 4 (2.44%) Onboarding
6 3 (1.83%) AI Agents
6 3 (1.83%) Hybrid Cloud
6 3 (1.83%) Mainframe
6 3 (1.83%) Multi-touch
7 2 (1.22%) Credit Risk
7 2 (1.22%) Distributed Computing
7 2 (1.22%) Distributed Systems
8 1 (0.61%) Data Centre
8 1 (0.61%) Data Fabric
8 1 (0.61%) Greenfield Project
8 1 (0.61%) Renewable Energy
8 1 (0.61%) Virtual Reality
Operating Systems
1 4 (2.44%) Linux
2 3 (1.83%) Unix
Processes & Methodologies
1 83 (50.61%) Data Science
2 79 (48.17%) Analytics
3 75 (45.73%) Visualisation
4 63 (38.41%) Machine Learning
5 55 (33.54%) Data Pipeline
6 51 (31.10%) Business Intelligence
7 45 (27.44%) Actionable Insight
7 45 (27.44%) Decision-Making
8 41 (25.00%) AI
9 39 (23.78%) Data Visualisation
10 38 (23.17%) Problem-Solving
11 36 (21.95%) Statistical Modelling
12 31 (18.90%) Agile
12 31 (18.90%) Statistical Analysis
13 30 (18.29%) Data Analytics
14 29 (17.68%) Statistics
15 27 (16.46%) Mathematics
16 23 (14.02%) Data Analysis
17 22 (13.41%) Dashboard Development
17 22 (13.41%) Validation
Programming Languages
1 157 (95.73%) Python
2 111 (67.68%) SQL
3 14 (8.54%) Java
4 7 (4.27%) C#
5 6 (3.66%) C++
6 5 (3.05%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 4 (2.44%) TypeScript
8 3 (1.83%) Scala
9 2 (1.22%) JavaScript
10 1 (0.61%) Cypher
10 1 (0.61%) SHACL
10 1 (0.61%) T-SQL
10 1 (0.61%) VB
Qualifications
1 40 (24.39%) Security Cleared
2 36 (21.95%) SC Cleared
3 26 (15.85%) Degree
4 5 (3.05%) PhD
5 4 (2.44%) Master's Degree
6 3 (1.83%) Computer Science Degree
7 2 (1.22%) BPSS Clearance
7 2 (1.22%) Microsoft Certification
7 2 (1.22%) Tableau Certification
8 1 (0.61%) Azure Certification
8 1 (0.61%) DV Cleared
8 1 (0.61%) Microsoft Certified Professional
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 13 (7.93%) Data Quality
2 9 (5.49%) Actionable Recommendations
3 8 (4.88%) QA
4 3 (1.83%) GDPR
5 2 (1.22%) Accessibility
6 1 (0.61%) MiFID
6 1 (0.61%) Sarbanes-Oxley
6 1 (0.61%) WCAG
System Software
1 2 (1.22%) Docker
Systems Management
1 9 (5.49%) Terraform
2 8 (4.88%) Kubernetes
3 1 (0.61%) Argo
3 1 (0.61%) Grafana
3 1 (0.61%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 15 (9.15%) Databricks
2 11 (6.71%) Microsoft
3 7 (4.27%) Amplitude
4 6 (3.66%) Google
5 4 (2.44%) OpenAI
6 3 (1.83%) Red Hat
7 2 (1.22%) Splunk
8 1 (0.61%) Alteryx
8 1 (0.61%) FactSet
8 1 (0.61%) Informatica
8 1 (0.61%) Pega
8 1 (0.61%) SAP
8 1 (0.61%) ServiceNow
8 1 (0.61%) Sonatype