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

6 months to
15 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 477 387 392
Rank change year-on-year -90 +5 +27
Contract jobs citing R 174 174 199
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.33% 0.54% 0.47%
As % of the Programming Languages category 1.23% 1.62% 1.51%
Number of daily rates quoted 120 109 123
10th Percentile £298 £323 £310
25th Percentile £406 £406 £363
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £490 £500
Median % change year-on-year -3.06% -2.00% -16.67%
75th Percentile £575 £575 £610
90th Percentile £676 £695 £685
UK excluding London median daily rate £438 £475 £550
% change year-on-year -7.89% -13.64% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 4 5 18
10th Percentile £27.93 £24.33 £20.08
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 £43.75
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 14,155 10,767 13,141
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.90% 33.18% 30.74%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,201 7,257 9,267
10th Percentile £360 £350 £350
25th Percentile £420 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £511 £505 £525
Median % change year-on-year +1.14% -3.76% -4.55%
75th Percentile £606 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £490 £475 £490
% change year-on-year +3.05% -3.06% -2.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 539 266 519
10th Percentile £34.01 £27.45 £31.25
25th Percentile £52.25 £35.25 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £56.75 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +14.54% -9.20% -
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £81.00 £80.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.25 £65.00
% change year-on-year +2.77% -2.69% +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 15 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 15 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 15 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 -116 153 £469 -6.30% 171
London -52 92 £525 +5.00% 62
Work from Home -62 62 £550 +13.99% 48
UK excluding London -123 58 £438 -7.89% 157
South East -66 14 £550 +24.29% 43
South West -32 12 £450 -34.66% 21
North of England -69 12 £425 -6.59% 36
East of England -31 10 £413 -26.67% 18
Yorkshire -47 9 £425 +1.49% 17
Midlands -60 6 £444 -0.73% 21
West Midlands -68 4 £450 +16.19% 8
Northern Ireland +3 2 £363 +3.57% 5
East Midlands -12 2 £252 -43.51% 13
North West -48 2 - - 13
Scotland -11 1 - - 7
Wales -13 1 £490 +10.11% 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 29 (16.67%) Apache Spark
2 11 (6.32%) Apache
3 4 (2.30%) Apache Superset
3 4 (2.30%) Confluence
4 2 (1.15%) Jupyter
5 1 (0.57%) R Markdown
5 1 (0.57%) SAS
Applications
1 19 (10.92%) Microsoft Excel
2 2 (1.15%) Spreadsheet
3 1 (0.57%) Chatbot
3 1 (0.57%) CPLEX
3 1 (0.57%) SPSS
Business Applications
1 1 (0.57%) SAP APO
1 1 (0.57%) SAP IBP
Cloud Services
1 53 (30.46%) Power Platform
2 51 (29.31%) AWS
3 43 (24.71%) Azure
4 15 (8.62%) GCP
4 15 (8.62%) Snowflake
5 5 (2.87%) Azure DevOps
6 4 (2.30%) Azure Synapse Analytics
6 4 (2.30%) SaaS
7 3 (1.72%) Amazon EKS
7 3 (1.72%) Amazon S3
7 3 (1.72%) Azure Data Factory
7 3 (1.72%) dbt
7 3 (1.72%) GitHub
7 3 (1.72%) Serverless
8 2 (1.15%) Cloud Functions
8 2 (1.15%) Google Analytics
9 1 (0.57%) Dagster
9 1 (0.57%) GitHub Actions
9 1 (0.57%) Google Data Studio
9 1 (0.57%) Google Kubernetes Engine
Communications & Networking
1 2 (1.15%) DSL
Database & Business Intelligence
1 52 (29.89%) Power BI
1 52 (29.89%) Tableau
2 26 (14.94%) Big Data
3 18 (10.34%) Hadoop
4 14 (8.05%) Data Warehouse
5 9 (5.17%) Looker
5 9 (5.17%) Relational Database
6 7 (4.02%) Mixpanel
7 4 (2.30%) BigQuery
7 4 (2.30%) Data Lake
7 4 (2.30%) Power Query
8 3 (1.72%) Amazon Athena
8 3 (1.72%) Apache Hive
8 3 (1.72%) NoSQL
8 3 (1.72%) RDBMS
8 3 (1.72%) SQL Server
9 2 (1.15%) Neo4j
9 2 (1.15%) PowerPivot
9 2 (1.15%) Snowflake Schema
9 2 (1.15%) Star Schema
Development Applications
1 5 (2.87%) Git
2 4 (2.30%) GitLab
3 3 (1.72%) JIRA
4 2 (1.15%) MLflow
5 1 (0.57%) Cucumber
5 1 (0.57%) Gatling
5 1 (0.57%) Jenkins
5 1 (0.57%) JUnit
5 1 (0.57%) RStudio
5 1 (0.57%) Selenium
General
1 56 (32.18%) Analytical Skills
2 35 (20.11%) Social Skills
3 34 (19.54%) Public Sector
4 27 (15.52%) Finance
5 14 (8.05%) Pharmaceutical
6 11 (6.32%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 11 (6.32%) Marketing
7 7 (4.02%) Telecoms
8 6 (3.45%) Retail
9 4 (2.30%) Banking
9 4 (2.30%) Front Office
10 3 (1.72%) Influencing Skills
10 3 (1.72%) Presentation Skills
11 2 (1.15%) Manufacturing
11 2 (1.15%) Military
11 2 (1.15%) Police
11 2 (1.15%) Publishing
11 2 (1.15%) Social Science
12 1 (0.57%) Billing
12 1 (0.57%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 49 (28.16%) Data Scientist
2 43 (24.71%) Analyst
3 33 (18.97%) Data Analyst
4 19 (10.92%) Senior
5 14 (8.05%) Data Engineer
5 14 (8.05%) Senior Data Scientist
6 13 (7.47%) Developer
7 11 (6.32%) Lead
8 9 (5.17%) Architect
8 9 (5.17%) SQL Analyst
8 9 (5.17%) Technical Analyst
9 7 (4.02%) Consultant
9 7 (4.02%) Lead Data Scientist
9 7 (4.02%) Software Engineer
9 7 (4.02%) SQL Data Analyst
10 6 (3.45%) Data Consultant
11 5 (2.87%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
11 5 (2.87%) Data Architect
11 5 (2.87%) Java Developer
11 5 (2.87%) Senior Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 12 (6.90%) PyTorch
1 12 (6.90%) TensorFlow
2 6 (3.45%) JSON
2 6 (3.45%) Pandas
3 5 (2.87%) Keras
4 4 (2.30%) XML
5 3 (1.72%) NumPy
5 3 (1.72%) React
5 3 (1.72%) scikit-learn
5 3 (1.72%) Shiny
6 2 (1.15%) AngularJS
6 2 (1.15%) Apache Avro
6 2 (1.15%) Apache Beam
6 2 (1.15%) Faiss
6 2 (1.15%) Hugging Face
6 2 (1.15%) LangChain
6 2 (1.15%) Matplotlib
6 2 (1.15%) Model Context Protocol
6 2 (1.15%) pytest
6 2 (1.15%) WebSockets
Miscellaneous
1 17 (9.77%) Algorithms
2 11 (6.32%) CRISPR
3 6 (3.45%) Onboarding
4 5 (2.87%) Cloud Native
4 5 (2.87%) Data Protection Act
4 5 (2.87%) Product Ownership
5 4 (2.30%) AI Agents
5 4 (2.30%) Analytical Mindset
5 4 (2.30%) Legacy Systems
6 3 (1.72%) Mainframe
6 3 (1.72%) Multi-touch
7 2 (1.15%) BYOD
7 2 (1.15%) Credit Risk
7 2 (1.15%) Distributed Computing
7 2 (1.15%) Distributed Systems
7 2 (1.15%) Fixed Income
7 2 (1.15%) Taxonomies
8 1 (0.57%) Data Fabric
8 1 (0.57%) Greenfield Project
8 1 (0.57%) Virtual Reality
Operating Systems
1 4 (2.30%) Linux
2 3 (1.72%) Unix
Processes & Methodologies
1 86 (49.43%) Data Science
2 84 (48.28%) Analytics
3 75 (43.10%) Visualisation
4 64 (36.78%) Machine Learning
5 57 (32.76%) Data Pipeline
6 51 (29.31%) Business Intelligence
7 47 (27.01%) Actionable Insight
7 47 (27.01%) Decision-Making
8 41 (23.56%) Data Visualisation
9 40 (22.99%) AI
10 37 (21.26%) Problem-Solving
11 36 (20.69%) Statistical Modelling
12 34 (19.54%) Statistical Analysis
13 31 (17.82%) Agile
14 30 (17.24%) Mathematics
15 29 (16.67%) Statistics
16 28 (16.09%) Data Analytics
17 24 (13.79%) Validation
18 22 (12.64%) Data Analysis
19 21 (12.07%) Data Modelling
Programming Languages
1 164 (94.25%) Python
2 113 (64.94%) SQL
3 18 (10.34%) Java
4 9 (5.17%) C++
5 7 (4.02%) C#
6 5 (2.87%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 3 (1.72%) JavaScript
7 3 (1.72%) TypeScript
8 2 (1.15%) Cypher
8 2 (1.15%) Scala
8 2 (1.15%) SHACL
9 1 (0.57%) T-SQL
9 1 (0.57%) VB
Qualifications
1 43 (24.71%) Security Cleared
2 36 (20.69%) SC Cleared
3 30 (17.24%) Degree
4 5 (2.87%) PhD
5 4 (2.30%) BPSS Clearance
5 4 (2.30%) Computer Science Degree
5 4 (2.30%) Master's Degree
6 2 (1.15%) Microsoft Certification
6 2 (1.15%) Microsoft Certified Professional
6 2 (1.15%) Tableau Certification
7 1 (0.57%) DV Cleared
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 13 (7.47%) Data Quality
2 9 (5.17%) Actionable Recommendations
2 9 (5.17%) QA
3 4 (2.30%) Accessibility
3 4 (2.30%) GDPR
4 2 (1.15%) California Consumer Privacy Act
4 2 (1.15%) WCAG
5 1 (0.57%) MiFID
5 1 (0.57%) Sarbanes-Oxley
System Software
1 2 (1.15%) Docker
Systems Management
1 9 (5.17%) Terraform
2 6 (3.45%) Kubernetes
3 2 (1.15%) Argo
3 2 (1.15%) Grafana
4 1 (0.57%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 14 (8.05%) Databricks
1 14 (8.05%) Microsoft
2 7 (4.02%) Amplitude
3 6 (3.45%) Google
4 5 (2.87%) OpenAI
5 2 (1.15%) FactSet
5 2 (1.15%) Splunk
6 1 (0.57%) Alteryx
6 1 (0.57%) Oracle
6 1 (0.57%) Pega
6 1 (0.57%) Red Hat
6 1 (0.57%) SAP
6 1 (0.57%) ServiceNow
6 1 (0.57%) Sonatype