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 30 April 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
30 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 460 350 401
Rank change year-on-year -110 +51 +19
Contract jobs citing R 185 171 201
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.39% 0.59% 0.46%
As % of the Programming Languages category 1.43% 1.72% 1.56%
Number of daily rates quoted 127 117 137
10th Percentile £313 £358 £342
25th Percentile £406 £409 £400
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -13.64% - -
75th Percentile £575 £675 £638
90th Percentile £650 £785 £763
UK excluding London median daily rate £438 £475 £412
% change year-on-year -7.89% +15.29% -13.26%
Number of hourly rates quoted 5 7 11
10th Percentile £22.38 £22.00 £25.36
25th Percentile £25.21 £22.75 £25.87
Median hourly rate £43.00 £26.32 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +63.37% -38.07% -39.29%
75th Percentile £60.25 £56.25 £53.58
90th Percentile £60.37 £59.55 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £25.42 £23.00 £25.36
% change year-on-year +10.50% -9.31% -55.90%

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 12,918 9,941 12,854
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 27.38% 34.02% 29.49%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,548 6,741 9,130
10th Percentile £355 £360 £350
25th Percentile £413 £419 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £600 £638 £650
90th Percentile £713 £769 £760
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £475 £489
% change year-on-year - -2.86% -2.20%
Number of hourly rates quoted 563 245 485
10th Percentile £42.05 £22.49 £31.25
25th Percentile £54.78 £33.91 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.50
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +3.31% -0.33%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £78.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.87 £62.50
% change year-on-year +1.77% +2.20% -

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 30 April 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 30 April 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for R in the UK

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 30 April 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 -94 163 £475 -13.64% 178
London -36 96 £525 -4.55% 60
Work from Home -13 71 £525 +7.97% 33
UK excluding London -105 63 £438 -7.89% 150
North of England -65 17 £425 -6.59% 36
South East -44 14 £588 +59.86% 47
Midlands -68 14 £395 -10.07% 18
Yorkshire -48 10 £425 +21.43% 11
East Midlands -21 9 £385 -13.87% 9
South West -32 9 £450 -32.84% 16
East of England -48 8 £413 -36.54% 22
North West -37 6 £526 +15.66% 17
West Midlands -65 5 £438 +1.39% 9
Wales -12 1 £425 -4.49% 5
North East - 1 £475 - 8

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 39 (21.08%) Apache Spark
2 12 (6.49%) Apache
3 5 (2.70%) SharePoint
4 4 (2.16%) Apache Superset
4 4 (2.16%) SAS
5 2 (1.08%) Apache Airflow
5 2 (1.08%) Jupyter
6 1 (0.54%) Confluence
6 1 (0.54%) R Markdown
Applications
1 21 (11.35%) Microsoft Excel
2 2 (1.08%) Microsoft Office
3 1 (0.54%) Chatbot
3 1 (0.54%) Spreadsheet
3 1 (0.54%) SPSS
Business Applications
1 2 (1.08%) SAP IBP
2 1 (0.54%) Salesforce CRM
2 1 (0.54%) SAP APO
2 1 (0.54%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 71 (38.38%) Power Platform
2 50 (27.03%) AWS
3 46 (24.86%) Azure
4 16 (8.65%) GCP
5 8 (4.32%) Power Automate
5 8 (4.32%) PowerApps
5 8 (4.32%) Snowflake
6 6 (3.24%) Azure Data Factory
6 6 (3.24%) Azure DevOps
7 5 (2.70%) Microsoft Purview
8 3 (1.62%) Amazon S3
8 3 (1.62%) Azure Synapse Analytics
8 3 (1.62%) Copilot Studio
8 3 (1.62%) dbt
8 3 (1.62%) OpenShift
8 3 (1.62%) Serverless
9 2 (1.08%) Amazon EMR
9 2 (1.08%) Amazon Kinesis
9 2 (1.08%) Azure Machine Learning
9 2 (1.08%) GitHub
Communications & Networking
1 1 (0.54%) 2G
1 1 (0.54%) 5G
1 1 (0.54%) LTE
1 1 (0.54%) Mobile Backhaul
1 1 (0.54%) VoIP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 70 (37.84%) Power BI
2 56 (30.27%) Tableau
3 35 (18.92%) Big Data
4 25 (13.51%) Hadoop
5 18 (9.73%) Data Warehouse
6 12 (6.49%) Looker
7 9 (4.86%) Power Query
7 9 (4.86%) Relational Database
8 7 (3.78%) Delta Lake
8 7 (3.78%) Metadata
8 7 (3.78%) Mixpanel
8 7 (3.78%) Spark SQL
9 6 (3.24%) Data Lake
10 5 (2.70%) NoSQL
10 5 (2.70%) SQL Server
11 4 (2.16%) Amazon Athena
11 4 (2.16%) Amazon Redshift
12 3 (1.62%) BigQuery
12 3 (1.62%) Data Mining
13 2 (1.08%) SQL Server Integration Services
Development Applications
1 9 (4.86%) Git
2 3 (1.62%) Jenkins
3 2 (1.08%) MLflow
4 1 (0.54%) RStudio
General
1 60 (32.43%) Analytical Skills
2 49 (26.49%) Social Skills
3 34 (18.38%) Finance
4 32 (17.30%) Public Sector
5 12 (6.49%) Inclusion and Diversity
5 12 (6.49%) Pharmaceutical
6 11 (5.95%) Marketing
7 6 (3.24%) Telecoms
8 4 (2.16%) Influencing Skills
8 4 (2.16%) Presentation Skills
9 3 (1.62%) Banking
10 2 (1.08%) Documentation Skills
10 2 (1.08%) Financial Institution
10 2 (1.08%) Front Office
10 2 (1.08%) Publishing
10 2 (1.08%) Retail
10 2 (1.08%) Social Science
11 1 (0.54%) Billing
11 1 (0.54%) Local Government
11 1 (0.54%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 56 (30.27%) Data Scientist
2 40 (21.62%) Analyst
3 34 (18.38%) Data Analyst
4 26 (14.05%) Senior
5 19 (10.27%) Data Engineer
6 16 (8.65%) Developer
6 16 (8.65%) Senior Data Scientist
7 11 (5.95%) Lead
8 9 (4.86%) Consultant
8 9 (4.86%) Technical Analyst
9 8 (4.32%) Architect
10 7 (3.78%) Lead Data Scientist
11 6 (3.24%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
11 6 (3.24%) Business Intelligence Developer
11 6 (3.24%) Data Consultant
12 5 (2.70%) Azure Engineer
12 5 (2.70%) Java Developer
12 5 (2.70%) Senior Analyst
12 5 (2.70%) SQL Analyst
12 5 (2.70%) SQL Data Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 13 (7.03%) TensorFlow
2 12 (6.49%) Pandas
3 10 (5.41%) PyTorch
4 9 (4.86%) PySpark
4 9 (4.86%) scikit-learn
5 7 (3.78%) JSON
6 6 (3.24%) Keras
7 5 (2.70%) NumPy
7 5 (2.70%) Shiny
7 5 (2.70%) YAML
8 4 (2.16%) LangChain
8 4 (2.16%) Matplotlib
8 4 (2.16%) Seaborn
9 3 (1.62%) Kafka
9 3 (1.62%) Plotly
10 2 (1.08%) CrewAI
10 2 (1.08%) Hugging Face
10 2 (1.08%) LangGraph
10 2 (1.08%) NLTK
10 2 (1.08%) Prophet
Miscellaneous
1 16 (8.65%) Algorithms
2 8 (4.32%) Cloud Native
3 7 (3.78%) CRISPR
3 7 (3.78%) Product Ownership
4 5 (2.70%) Data Protection Act
4 5 (2.70%) Self-Motivation
5 4 (2.16%) Data Structures
5 4 (2.16%) Multi-touch
6 3 (1.62%) AI Agents
6 3 (1.62%) Hybrid Cloud
6 3 (1.62%) Legacy Systems
6 3 (1.62%) Management Information System
6 3 (1.62%) Onboarding
7 2 (1.08%) Analytical Mindset
7 2 (1.08%) Credit Risk
7 2 (1.08%) Distributed Computing
7 2 (1.08%) Distributed Systems
7 2 (1.08%) Mainframe
8 1 (0.54%) Data Fabric
8 1 (0.54%) Virtual Reality
Operating Systems
1 3 (1.62%) Linux
2 2 (1.08%) Unix
Processes & Methodologies
1 98 (52.97%) Data Science
2 96 (51.89%) Analytics
3 82 (44.32%) Visualisation
4 70 (37.84%) Business Intelligence
5 69 (37.30%) Machine Learning
6 57 (30.81%) Decision-Making
7 48 (25.95%) Data Pipeline
8 47 (25.41%) Problem-Solving
9 44 (23.78%) Actionable Insight
9 44 (23.78%) Data Visualisation
10 38 (20.54%) Statistical Modelling
11 35 (18.92%) Agile
12 33 (17.84%) Data Analytics
12 33 (17.84%) Data Modelling
13 32 (17.30%) AI
13 32 (17.30%) Data Analysis
13 32 (17.30%) Mathematics
13 32 (17.30%) Statistics
14 31 (16.76%) Validation
15 29 (15.68%) Statistical Analysis
Programming Languages
1 177 (95.68%) Python
2 136 (73.51%) SQL
3 13 (7.03%) Java
4 11 (5.95%) Data Analysis Expressions
5 7 (3.78%) C#
5 7 (3.78%) Scala
6 6 (3.24%) C++
6 6 (3.24%) JavaScript
7 3 (1.62%) TypeScript
8 2 (1.08%) Ada
8 2 (1.08%) VBA
9 1 (0.54%) LookML
9 1 (0.54%) SAS Macro
Qualifications
1 50 (27.03%) Security Cleared
2 43 (23.24%) SC Cleared
3 33 (17.84%) Degree
4 7 (3.78%) Computer Science Degree
5 6 (3.24%) Master's Degree
5 6 (3.24%) Microsoft Certification
5 6 (3.24%) PhD
6 5 (2.70%) BPSS Clearance
7 3 (1.62%) Azure Certification
8 2 (1.08%) Tableau Certification
9 1 (0.54%) CIMA
9 1 (0.54%) CTC Cleared
9 1 (0.54%) DBS Check
9 1 (0.54%) DV Cleared
9 1 (0.54%) Numerate Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 22 (11.89%) Data Quality
2 10 (5.41%) Actionable Recommendations
3 7 (3.78%) GDPR
3 7 (3.78%) QA
4 3 (1.62%) Accessibility
5 2 (1.08%) PCI DSS
5 2 (1.08%) WCAG
6 1 (0.54%) MiFID
6 1 (0.54%) Sarbanes-Oxley
System Software
1 4 (2.16%) Docker
2 2 (1.08%) HDFS
Systems Management
1 9 (4.86%) Kubernetes
2 8 (4.32%) Terraform
Vendors
1 21 (11.35%) Databricks
2 20 (10.81%) Microsoft
3 7 (3.78%) Amplitude
4 5 (2.70%) OpenAI
5 4 (2.16%) Google
6 3 (1.62%) Informatica
6 3 (1.62%) Oracle
6 3 (1.62%) Red Hat
6 3 (1.62%) SAP
6 3 (1.62%) ServiceNow
7 2 (1.08%) Pega
7 2 (1.08%) Splunk
8 1 (0.54%) Adobe
8 1 (0.54%) Alteryx
8 1 (0.54%) Cognos
8 1 (0.54%) Salesforce
8 1 (0.54%) UiPath