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 17 December 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
17 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 405 338 383
Rank change year-on-year -67 +45 +15
Contract jobs citing R 183 225 232
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.50% 0.65% 0.53%
As % of the Programming Languages category 1.59% 2.01% 1.72%
Number of daily rates quoted 110 127 165
10th Percentile £302 £310 £320
25th Percentile £406 £353 £400
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -4.76% -8.22%
75th Percentile £595 £612 £638
90th Percentile £688 £718 £763
UK excluding London median daily rate £503 £488 £513
% change year-on-year +3.08% -4.88% +4.59%
Number of hourly rates quoted 6 11 13
10th Percentile £21.67 £20.12 £25.40
25th Percentile £23.43 £20.68 £26.24
Median hourly rate £26.46 £24.00 £35.63
Median % change year-on-year +10.24% -32.64% +37.04%
75th Percentile £29.69 £53.75 £48.75
90th Percentile £31.88 - £49.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £25.42 £20.24 £47.50
% change year-on-year +25.60% -57.40% +132.05%

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 11,527 11,179 13,489
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 31.33% 32.49% 30.75%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,612 7,193 9,595
10th Percentile £350 £350 £360
25th Percentile £413 £425 £431
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £505 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -3.81% -4.55% -3.08%
75th Percentile £619 £650 £650
90th Percentile £725 £751 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £490 £500
% change year-on-year -3.06% -2.00% -3.85%
Number of hourly rates quoted 369 265 416
10th Percentile £31.25 £21.55 £33.66
25th Percentile £50.00 £40.06 £47.50
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% - -
75th Percentile £68.75 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £85.00 £78.38
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.75 £65.00
% change year-on-year +1.97% -1.93% -

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 17 December 2025.

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
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 17 December 2025. 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 -63 162 £500 - 333
London -37 82 £511 +2.25% 81
UK excluding London -64 78 £503 +3.08% 318
Work from Home +1 61 £550 +10.00% 94
South East -11 21 £588 +14.63% 81
Midlands -30 18 £435 +12.26% 62
North of England -43 16 £465 +30.62% 92
North West -21 14 £479 +34.41% 49
East of England -9 12 £608 -6.46% 41
East Midlands -21 11 £385 +13.24% 30
West Midlands -35 7 £475 -12.60% 31
Wales +2 6 £366 - 10
Scotland -4 3 £550 +8.11% 11
South West -13 2 - - 21
Yorkshire -42 2 £450 +20.00% 35

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 22 (12.02%) Apache Spark
2 19 (10.38%) SAS
3 8 (4.37%) SharePoint
4 6 (3.28%) Apache Airflow
5 4 (2.19%) Apache
5 4 (2.19%) Confluence
6 1 (0.55%) Jupyter
6 1 (0.55%) Luigi
Applications
1 26 (14.21%) Microsoft Excel
2 11 (6.01%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 10 (5.46%) Microsoft Office
4 1 (0.55%) Chatbot
4 1 (0.55%) ProjectWise
Business Applications
1 2 (1.09%) Distributed Ledger
2 1 (0.55%) NEC Housing
2 1 (0.55%) Salesforce CRM
2 1 (0.55%) SAP ERP
2 1 (0.55%) SAP IBP
2 1 (0.55%) SAP S/4HANA
2 1 (0.55%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 70 (38.25%) Power Platform
2 56 (30.60%) Azure
3 36 (19.67%) AWS
4 27 (14.75%) GCP
5 9 (4.92%) Power Automate
5 9 (4.92%) PowerApps
6 8 (4.37%) Azure Synapse Analytics
6 8 (4.37%) Snowflake
7 7 (3.83%) Azure Machine Learning
8 6 (3.28%) Azure Data Factory
9 4 (2.19%) Azure AKS
9 4 (2.19%) Azure DevOps
9 4 (2.19%) Microsoft Purview
10 3 (1.64%) Adobe Analytics
10 3 (1.64%) Copilot Studio
10 3 (1.64%) dbt
10 3 (1.64%) Google Analytics
11 2 (1.09%) AWS Lambda
11 2 (1.09%) Cloud Computing
11 2 (1.09%) Serverless
Communications & Networking
1 2 (1.09%) 2G
1 2 (1.09%) 5G
1 2 (1.09%) LTE
1 2 (1.09%) Mobile Backhaul
1 2 (1.09%) VoIP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 70 (38.25%) Power BI
2 49 (26.78%) Tableau
3 21 (11.48%) Big Data
4 19 (10.38%) Data Warehouse
5 16 (8.74%) Hadoop
6 10 (5.46%) Data Lake
6 10 (5.46%) Looker
7 9 (4.92%) NoSQL
8 8 (4.37%) Power Query
9 7 (3.83%) Data Mining
10 6 (3.28%) Delta Lake
10 6 (3.28%) Metadata
11 5 (2.73%) Relational Database
11 5 (2.73%) Spark SQL
12 4 (2.19%) Amazon Redshift
12 4 (2.19%) Mixpanel
12 4 (2.19%) Spotfire
12 4 (2.19%) SQL Server
13 3 (1.64%) Impala
13 3 (1.64%) PostgreSQL
Development Applications
1 16 (8.74%) Git
2 5 (2.73%) Jenkins
2 5 (2.73%) JIRA
3 4 (2.19%) MLflow
4 2 (1.09%) GoCD
4 2 (1.09%) SonarQube
4 2 (1.09%) Sonatype Nexus
4 2 (1.09%) TeamCity
5 1 (0.55%) Bitbucket
5 1 (0.55%) Eclipse
5 1 (0.55%) Maven
5 1 (0.55%) RStudio
General
1 72 (39.34%) Social Skills
2 62 (33.88%) Analytical Skills
3 50 (27.32%) Finance
4 20 (10.93%) Marketing
5 17 (9.29%) Public Sector
6 14 (7.65%) Pharmaceutical
7 13 (7.10%) Banking
8 6 (3.28%) Manufacturing
8 6 (3.28%) Organisational Skills
9 4 (2.19%) Legal
10 3 (1.64%) Documentation Skills
10 3 (1.64%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 3 (1.64%) Local Government
10 3 (1.64%) Presentation Skills
10 3 (1.64%) Telecoms
11 2 (1.09%) Digital Health
11 2 (1.09%) Influencing Skills
11 2 (1.09%) Retail
12 1 (0.55%) Advertising
12 1 (0.55%) Investment Banking
Job Titles
1 44 (24.04%) Data Scientist
2 37 (20.22%) Analyst
3 26 (14.21%) Data Analyst
4 20 (10.93%) Developer
4 20 (10.93%) Senior
5 19 (10.38%) Data Engineer
6 18 (9.84%) Architect
7 9 (4.92%) Lead
7 9 (4.92%) Senior Data Scientist
8 7 (3.83%) Business Intelligence Developer
9 6 (3.28%) Azure Engineer
9 6 (3.28%) Business Analyst
9 6 (3.28%) Consultant
9 6 (3.28%) Power BI Developer
9 6 (3.28%) Software Engineer
10 5 (2.73%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
10 5 (2.73%) Security Architect
10 5 (2.73%) Senior Analyst
11 4 (2.19%) Artificial Intelligence Developer
11 4 (2.19%) Data Analytics Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 17 (9.29%) scikit-learn
1 17 (9.29%) TensorFlow
2 14 (7.65%) PyTorch
3 11 (6.01%) Pandas
4 6 (3.28%) Kafka
4 6 (3.28%) PySpark
5 4 (2.19%) Google JAX
5 4 (2.19%) JAX
5 4 (2.19%) Matplotlib
5 4 (2.19%) Seaborn
5 4 (2.19%) YAML
6 3 (1.64%) FastAPI
6 3 (1.64%) FHIR
6 3 (1.64%) JSON
6 3 (1.64%) NumPy
6 3 (1.64%) Shiny
7 2 (1.09%) ATL
7 2 (1.09%) REST
7 2 (1.09%) XML
8 1 (0.55%) CSS
Miscellaneous
1 19 (10.38%) Algorithms
2 12 (6.56%) Credit Risk
3 8 (4.37%) Data Structures
4 7 (3.83%) Self-Motivation
5 6 (3.28%) Product Ownership
6 5 (2.73%) Cloud Native
7 4 (2.19%) Analytical Mindset
7 4 (2.19%) NHS
8 3 (1.64%) IoT
8 3 (1.64%) Management Information System
8 3 (1.64%) Multi-touch
9 2 (1.09%) Distributed Computing
9 2 (1.09%) Genomics
9 2 (1.09%) Legacy Systems
9 2 (1.09%) Life Science
9 2 (1.09%) Mobile App
9 2 (1.09%) Onboarding
9 2 (1.09%) Security Posture
10 1 (0.55%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
10 1 (0.55%) Private Cloud
Operating Systems
1 5 (2.73%) Linux
2 2 (1.09%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 90 (49.18%) Data Science
2 82 (44.81%) Analytics
3 76 (41.53%) Business Intelligence
4 75 (40.98%) Machine Learning
5 64 (34.97%) Visualisation
6 48 (26.23%) Data Analysis
6 48 (26.23%) Data Modelling
6 48 (26.23%) Decision-Making
7 45 (24.59%) Problem-Solving
8 39 (21.31%) Statistical Modelling
9 37 (20.22%) Data Visualisation
10 33 (18.03%) Agile
11 32 (17.49%) Actionable Insight
11 32 (17.49%) Data Governance
12 29 (15.85%) AI
13 28 (15.30%) Validation
14 26 (14.21%) CI/CD
15 23 (12.57%) Data Pipeline
15 23 (12.57%) Stakeholder Engagement
15 23 (12.57%) Stakeholder Management
Programming Languages
1 173 (94.54%) Python
2 121 (66.12%) SQL
3 16 (8.74%) Java
4 13 (7.10%) C++
5 10 (5.46%) Scala
6 9 (4.92%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 8 (4.37%) MATLAB
8 5 (2.73%) JavaScript
9 4 (2.19%) C
9 4 (2.19%) PL/SQL
9 4 (2.19%) VBA
10 3 (1.64%) Go
11 2 (1.09%) Rust
12 1 (0.55%) Bash
12 1 (0.55%) Fortran
12 1 (0.55%) Korn
12 1 (0.55%) LookML
12 1 (0.55%) PowerShell
12 1 (0.55%) SAS Macro
Qualifications
1 35 (19.13%) Degree
2 25 (13.66%) Security Cleared
3 19 (10.38%) SC Cleared
4 11 (6.01%) Master's Degree
5 10 (5.46%) Computer Science Degree
6 9 (4.92%) BPSS Clearance
7 7 (3.83%) PhD
8 4 (2.19%) Microsoft Certification
9 2 (1.09%) Azure Certification
9 2 (1.09%) Tableau Certification
10 1 (0.55%) ACCA
10 1 (0.55%) CFA
10 1 (0.55%) CIMA
10 1 (0.55%) CTC Cleared
10 1 (0.55%) DBS Check
10 1 (0.55%) GIAC
10 1 (0.55%) Numerate Degree
10 1 (0.55%) Postgraduate
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 33 (18.03%) Data Quality
2 9 (4.92%) GDPR
3 8 (4.37%) QA
4 4 (2.19%) EU AI Act
4 4 (2.19%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 2 (1.09%) Accessibility
5 2 (1.09%) Actionable Recommendations
5 2 (1.09%) DICOM
5 2 (1.09%) NIST
5 2 (1.09%) PCI DSS
6 1 (0.55%) HL7
6 1 (0.55%) IFRS
6 1 (0.55%) IFRS 9
6 1 (0.55%) LOINC
6 1 (0.55%) Sarbanes-Oxley
6 1 (0.55%) SNOMED CT
6 1 (0.55%) WCAG
System Software
1 10 (5.46%) Docker
2 3 (1.64%) Slurm Workload Manager
3 1 (0.55%) Lustre
Systems Management
1 13 (7.10%) Kubernetes
2 2 (1.09%) Ansible
2 2 (1.09%) rkt
2 2 (1.09%) Terraform
3 1 (0.55%) Packer
3 1 (0.55%) Progress Chef
Vendors
1 23 (12.57%) Microsoft
2 21 (11.48%) Databricks
3 9 (4.92%) Oracle
4 7 (3.83%) Pega
5 6 (3.28%) Google
6 4 (2.19%) Amplitude
6 4 (2.19%) SAP
6 4 (2.19%) ServiceNow
6 4 (2.19%) TIBCO
7 3 (1.64%) Adobe
7 3 (1.64%) Cognos
7 3 (1.64%) Splunk
8 2 (1.09%) Alteryx
8 2 (1.09%) Bloomberg
8 2 (1.09%) Dynatrace
8 2 (1.09%) Refinitiv
9 1 (0.55%) Arqiva
9 1 (0.55%) Automation Anywhere
9 1 (0.55%) UiPath
9 1 (0.55%) Workday