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 12 January 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
12 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 406 332 370
Rank change year-on-year -74 +38 +33
Contract jobs citing R 170 202 231
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.47% 0.64% 0.54%
As % of the Programming Languages category 1.53% 1.96% 1.78%
Number of daily rates quoted 105 109 165
10th Percentile £277 £310 £319
25th Percentile £400 £375 £400
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £490 £513 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.39% -2.38% -2.78%
75th Percentile £579 £638 £638
90th Percentile £688 £779 £763
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £471 £450
% change year-on-year +6.10% +4.72% -5.26%
Number of hourly rates quoted 6 9 14
10th Percentile £21.67 £21.02 £25.42
25th Percentile £23.43 £21.25 £28.43
Median hourly rate £26.46 £28.50 £40.32
Median % change year-on-year -7.17% -29.31% +55.06%
75th Percentile £29.69 £53.75 £48.44
90th Percentile £31.88 £55.15 £49.63
UK excluding London median hourly rate £25.42 £22.50 £47.50
% change year-on-year +12.96% -52.63% +122.85%

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 11,145 10,321 12,977
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 30.75% 32.75% 30.22%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,384 6,550 9,218
10th Percentile £350 £350 £350
25th Percentile £413 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £505 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -3.81% -4.55% -3.13%
75th Percentile £619 £640 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £481 £488 £500
% change year-on-year -1.28% -2.50% -2.44%
Number of hourly rates quoted 386 238 418
10th Percentile £35.63 £21.25 £34.20
25th Percentile £51.38 £36.00 £46.67
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% - -0.79%
75th Percentile £68.75 £68.56 £70.00
90th Percentile £76.25 £85.00 £78.23
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +3.17% -3.08% -

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 12 January 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
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 12 January 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 -82 151 £492 -5.38% 248
London -31 79 £500 -9.09% 54
UK excluding London -59 68 £500 +6.10% 240
Work from Home -5 57 £518 +0.98% 29
Midlands -41 20 £435 +17.01% 31
South East -17 17 £600 +17.07% 73
North of England -44 14 £479 +34.41% 51
East Midlands -16 13 £385 +13.24% 20
North West -24 12 £492 +38.20% 24
East of England -20 8 £641 -1.38% 33
West Midlands -35 7 £475 - 11
Wales 0 5 £366 - 11
Scotland -6 2 £569 +21.66% 11
South West -27 2 - - 31
Yorkshire -37 2 £450 +20.00% 17

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 21 (12.35%) Apache Spark
2 17 (10.00%) SAS
3 8 (4.71%) SharePoint
4 5 (2.94%) Apache Airflow
5 4 (2.35%) Apache
6 3 (1.76%) Confluence
7 1 (0.59%) Jupyter
Applications
1 23 (13.53%) Microsoft Excel
2 9 (5.29%) Microsoft Office
2 9 (5.29%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 1 (0.59%) Chatbot
3 1 (0.59%) ProjectWise
Business Applications
1 1 (0.59%) Distributed Ledger
1 1 (0.59%) Salesforce CRM
1 1 (0.59%) SAP ERP
1 1 (0.59%) SAP IBP
1 1 (0.59%) SAP S/4HANA
1 1 (0.59%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 67 (39.41%) Power Platform
2 52 (30.59%) Azure
3 38 (22.35%) AWS
4 25 (14.71%) GCP
5 9 (5.29%) Power Automate
5 9 (5.29%) PowerApps
5 9 (5.29%) Snowflake
6 8 (4.71%) Azure Synapse Analytics
7 7 (4.12%) Azure Machine Learning
8 6 (3.53%) Azure Data Factory
9 4 (2.35%) Azure AKS
9 4 (2.35%) Azure DevOps
9 4 (2.35%) Microsoft Purview
10 3 (1.76%) Amazon Bedrock
10 3 (1.76%) Copilot Studio
10 3 (1.76%) dbt
11 2 (1.18%) Adobe Analytics
11 2 (1.18%) Amazon Kinesis
11 2 (1.18%) AWS Lambda
11 2 (1.18%) Serverless
Communications & Networking
1 2 (1.18%) 2G
1 2 (1.18%) 5G
1 2 (1.18%) LTE
1 2 (1.18%) Mobile Backhaul
1 2 (1.18%) VoIP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 67 (39.41%) Power BI
2 46 (27.06%) Tableau
3 23 (13.53%) Big Data
4 20 (11.76%) Data Warehouse
5 17 (10.00%) Hadoop
6 12 (7.06%) Data Lake
7 9 (5.29%) Data Mining
8 8 (4.71%) Looker
8 8 (4.71%) Power Query
9 7 (4.12%) NoSQL
10 6 (3.53%) Amazon Redshift
10 6 (3.53%) Delta Lake
10 6 (3.53%) Metadata
11 5 (2.94%) Relational Database
11 5 (2.94%) Spark SQL
12 4 (2.35%) SQL Server
13 3 (1.76%) BigQuery
13 3 (1.76%) Enterprise Data Warehouse
13 3 (1.76%) Impala
13 3 (1.76%) Spotfire
Development Applications
1 12 (7.06%) Git
2 5 (2.94%) Jenkins
3 4 (2.35%) JIRA
3 4 (2.35%) MLflow
4 2 (1.18%) GoCD
4 2 (1.18%) SonarQube
4 2 (1.18%) Sonatype Nexus
4 2 (1.18%) TeamCity
5 1 (0.59%) Bitbucket
5 1 (0.59%) Maven
5 1 (0.59%) RStudio
General
1 60 (35.29%) Social Skills
2 53 (31.18%) Analytical Skills
3 44 (25.88%) Finance
4 17 (10.00%) Public Sector
5 16 (9.41%) Marketing
6 13 (7.65%) Banking
6 13 (7.65%) Pharmaceutical
7 6 (3.53%) Organisational Skills
8 5 (2.94%) Manufacturing
9 3 (1.76%) Documentation Skills
9 3 (1.76%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 3 (1.76%) Legal
10 2 (1.18%) Digital Health
10 2 (1.18%) Influencing Skills
10 2 (1.18%) Local Government
10 2 (1.18%) Presentation Skills
10 2 (1.18%) Retail
10 2 (1.18%) Telecoms
11 1 (0.59%) Advertising
11 1 (0.59%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 42 (24.71%) Data Scientist
2 34 (20.00%) Analyst
3 25 (14.71%) Data Analyst
4 20 (11.76%) Senior
5 18 (10.59%) Data Engineer
6 17 (10.00%) Developer
7 11 (6.47%) Architect
8 8 (4.71%) Lead
8 8 (4.71%) Senior Data Scientist
8 8 (4.71%) Software Engineer
9 7 (4.12%) Business Intelligence Developer
10 6 (3.53%) Azure Engineer
10 6 (3.53%) Consultant
10 6 (3.53%) Power BI Developer
11 5 (2.94%) Business Analyst
12 4 (2.35%) Machine Learning Engineer
12 4 (2.35%) Python Engineer
12 4 (2.35%) Senior Analyst
12 4 (2.35%) SQL Analyst
12 4 (2.35%) SQL Data Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 12 (7.06%) scikit-learn
1 12 (7.06%) TensorFlow
2 10 (5.88%) Pandas
3 9 (5.29%) PyTorch
4 8 (4.71%) PySpark
5 5 (2.94%) Kafka
6 4 (2.35%) YAML
7 3 (1.76%) FastAPI
7 3 (1.76%) FHIR
7 3 (1.76%) JSON
7 3 (1.76%) Matplotlib
7 3 (1.76%) NumPy
7 3 (1.76%) Seaborn
7 3 (1.76%) Shiny
8 2 (1.18%) CrewAI
8 2 (1.18%) LangChain
8 2 (1.18%) LangGraph
8 2 (1.18%) NLTK
8 2 (1.18%) Plotly
8 2 (1.18%) REST
Miscellaneous
1 13 (7.65%) Algorithms
2 12 (7.06%) Credit Risk
3 9 (5.29%) Self-Motivation
4 7 (4.12%) Cloud Native
4 7 (4.12%) Data Structures
5 5 (2.94%) Management Information System
5 5 (2.94%) Product Ownership
6 4 (2.35%) NHS
7 3 (1.76%) Analytical Mindset
7 3 (1.76%) IoT
8 2 (1.18%) AI Agents
8 2 (1.18%) Distributed Computing
8 2 (1.18%) Genomics
8 2 (1.18%) Hybrid Cloud
8 2 (1.18%) Mobile App
8 2 (1.18%) Multi-touch
8 2 (1.18%) Onboarding
9 1 (0.59%) Augmented Reality
9 1 (0.59%) CUDA
9 1 (0.59%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
Operating Systems
1 3 (1.76%) Linux
2 1 (0.59%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 82 (48.24%) Data Science
2 81 (47.65%) Analytics
3 70 (41.18%) Business Intelligence
4 65 (38.24%) Machine Learning
5 60 (35.29%) Visualisation
6 46 (27.06%) Data Analysis
7 45 (26.47%) Decision-Making
8 43 (25.29%) Data Modelling
9 39 (22.94%) Problem-Solving
10 34 (20.00%) Agile
11 33 (19.41%) Actionable Insight
11 33 (19.41%) Statistical Modelling
12 32 (18.82%) Data Visualisation
13 29 (17.06%) Data Governance
14 26 (15.29%) Validation
15 25 (14.71%) AI
16 24 (14.12%) CI/CD
17 22 (12.94%) Data Analytics
18 20 (11.76%) Stakeholder Engagement
19 19 (11.18%) Stakeholder Management
Programming Languages
1 161 (94.71%) Python
2 118 (69.41%) SQL
3 12 (7.06%) Java
4 11 (6.47%) C++
5 9 (5.29%) Data Analysis Expressions
6 8 (4.71%) MATLAB
6 8 (4.71%) Scala
7 5 (2.94%) JavaScript
8 4 (2.35%) PL/SQL
8 4 (2.35%) VBA
9 3 (1.76%) Go
10 2 (1.18%) Ada
10 2 (1.18%) C#
10 2 (1.18%) Rust
10 2 (1.18%) TypeScript
11 1 (0.59%) Bash
11 1 (0.59%) C
11 1 (0.59%) Fortran
11 1 (0.59%) Korn
11 1 (0.59%) LookML
Qualifications
1 30 (17.65%) Degree
2 23 (13.53%) Security Cleared
3 18 (10.59%) SC Cleared
4 12 (7.06%) Computer Science Degree
5 8 (4.71%) Master's Degree
6 7 (4.12%) BPSS Clearance
7 4 (2.35%) Microsoft Certification
7 4 (2.35%) PhD
8 2 (1.18%) Azure Certification
8 2 (1.18%) MCP
8 2 (1.18%) Tableau Certification
9 1 (0.59%) ACCA
9 1 (0.59%) CFA
9 1 (0.59%) CIMA
9 1 (0.59%) CTC Cleared
9 1 (0.59%) DBS Check
9 1 (0.59%) GIAC
9 1 (0.59%) Numerate Degree
9 1 (0.59%) Postgraduate
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 26 (15.29%) Data Quality
2 6 (3.53%) GDPR
2 6 (3.53%) QA
3 4 (2.35%) Actionable Recommendations
4 2 (1.18%) Accessibility
4 2 (1.18%) DICOM
4 2 (1.18%) PCI DSS
5 1 (0.59%) HL7
5 1 (0.59%) IFRS
5 1 (0.59%) IFRS 9
5 1 (0.59%) LOINC
5 1 (0.59%) Sarbanes-Oxley
5 1 (0.59%) SNOMED CT
5 1 (0.59%) WCAG
System Software
1 10 (5.88%) Docker
2 2 (1.18%) HDFS
3 1 (0.59%) Lustre
3 1 (0.59%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 11 (6.47%) Kubernetes
2 2 (1.18%) Ansible
2 2 (1.18%) rkt
2 2 (1.18%) Terraform
3 1 (0.59%) Packer
3 1 (0.59%) Progress Chef
Vendors
1 24 (14.12%) Databricks
2 20 (11.76%) Microsoft
3 9 (5.29%) Oracle
4 7 (4.12%) Pega
5 5 (2.94%) Google
6 4 (2.35%) SAP
7 3 (1.76%) Cognos
7 3 (1.76%) Informatica
7 3 (1.76%) ServiceNow
7 3 (1.76%) Splunk
7 3 (1.76%) TIBCO
8 2 (1.18%) Adobe
8 2 (1.18%) Alteryx
8 2 (1.18%) Amplitude
8 2 (1.18%) Dynatrace
8 2 (1.18%) OpenAI
8 2 (1.18%) Red Hat
9 1 (0.59%) Salesforce
9 1 (0.59%) Software AG
9 1 (0.59%) webMethods