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

6 months to
8 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 452 361 380
Rank change year-on-year -91 +19 +53
Contract jobs citing R 176 170 214
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.38% 0.58% 0.49%
As % of the Programming Languages category 1.36% 1.71% 1.67%
Number of daily rates quoted 120 118 148
10th Percentile £346 £329 £314
25th Percentile £406 £406 £388
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £510 £525 £540
Median % change year-on-year -2.86% -2.78% -1.82%
75th Percentile £575 £675 £638
90th Percentile £650 £782 £763
UK excluding London median daily rate £450 £471 £413
% change year-on-year -4.51% +14.24% -5.71%
Number of hourly rates quoted 5 7 13
10th Percentile £22.38 £22.00 £25.36
25th Percentile £25.21 £22.75 £25.50
Median hourly rate £43.00 £26.32 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +63.37% -38.07% -35.11%
75th Percentile £60.25 £56.25 £52.50
90th Percentile £60.37 £59.55 £72.93
UK excluding London median hourly rate £25.42 £23.00 £25.36
% change year-on-year +10.50% -9.31% -29.71%

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 12,912 9,927 12,821
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 28.22% 33.97% 29.21%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,597 6,679 9,098
10th Percentile £355 £356 £350
25th Percentile £413 £415 £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 £715 £763 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £478 £488
% change year-on-year -0.58% -1.95% -2.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 539 243 478
10th Percentile £41.87 £22.27 £30.63
25th Percentile £55.00 £32.51 £46.18
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +4.17% -4.00%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.25 £67.29
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £74.61
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £64.00 £60.50
% change year-on-year +1.56% +5.79% -3.20%

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 8 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 8 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 8 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 -108 155 £510 -2.86% 187
London -61 89 £525 -4.55% 62
Work from Home -5 68 £531 +9.95% 40
UK excluding London -106 62 £450 -4.51% 154
South East -40 17 £588 +48.26% 39
North of England -54 14 £475 +4.40% 34
Midlands -62 14 £395 -3.54% 23
East Midlands -25 9 £385 +31.40% 15
North West -27 9 £530 +16.51% 14
South West -33 9 £450 -5.26% 22
East of England -40 7 £413 -36.54% 21
West Midlands -69 5 £438 +1.39% 8
Yorkshire -49 4 £425 +21.43% 13
Wales -10 1 £425 - 7
North East - 1 £475 - 7

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 35 (19.89%) Apache Spark
2 11 (6.25%) Apache
3 7 (3.98%) SAS
4 5 (2.84%) SharePoint
5 4 (2.27%) Apache Superset
6 2 (1.14%) Apache Airflow
6 2 (1.14%) Jupyter
7 1 (0.57%) Confluence
7 1 (0.57%) R Markdown
Applications
1 15 (8.52%) Microsoft Excel
2 2 (1.14%) Microsoft Office
3 1 (0.57%) Chatbot
3 1 (0.57%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 2 (1.14%) SAP IBP
2 1 (0.57%) Salesforce CRM
2 1 (0.57%) SAP APO
2 1 (0.57%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 64 (36.36%) Power Platform
2 52 (29.55%) AWS
3 46 (26.14%) Azure
4 20 (11.36%) GCP
5 8 (4.55%) Power Automate
5 8 (4.55%) PowerApps
6 7 (3.98%) Snowflake
7 6 (3.41%) Azure Data Factory
8 5 (2.84%) Azure DevOps
8 5 (2.84%) Microsoft Purview
9 3 (1.70%) Amazon Bedrock
9 3 (1.70%) Azure Synapse Analytics
9 3 (1.70%) Copilot Studio
9 3 (1.70%) dbt
9 3 (1.70%) OpenShift
9 3 (1.70%) Serverless
10 2 (1.14%) Amazon EMR
10 2 (1.14%) Amazon Kinesis
10 2 (1.14%) Amazon SageMaker
10 2 (1.14%) Azure Machine Learning
Communications & Networking
1 2 (1.14%) 2G
1 2 (1.14%) 5G
1 2 (1.14%) LTE
1 2 (1.14%) Mobile Backhaul
1 2 (1.14%) VoIP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 64 (36.36%) Power BI
2 49 (27.84%) Tableau
3 33 (18.75%) Big Data
4 24 (13.64%) Hadoop
5 21 (11.93%) Data Warehouse
6 11 (6.25%) Looker
7 9 (5.11%) Power Query
8 8 (4.55%) Relational Database
9 7 (3.98%) Delta Lake
9 7 (3.98%) Metadata
9 7 (3.98%) Mixpanel
9 7 (3.98%) Spark SQL
10 6 (3.41%) Data Lake
11 5 (2.84%) Amazon Redshift
11 5 (2.84%) NoSQL
11 5 (2.84%) SQL Server
12 4 (2.27%) Amazon Athena
12 4 (2.27%) Data Mining
13 3 (1.70%) BigQuery
14 2 (1.14%) Parquet
Development Applications
1 11 (6.25%) Git
2 4 (2.27%) Jenkins
3 2 (1.14%) MLflow
3 2 (1.14%) RStudio
4 1 (0.57%) Bitbucket
4 1 (0.57%) JIRA
4 1 (0.57%) Maven
General
1 54 (30.68%) Analytical Skills
2 52 (29.55%) Social Skills
3 37 (21.02%) Finance
4 32 (18.18%) Public Sector
5 12 (6.82%) Pharmaceutical
6 10 (5.68%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 10 (5.68%) Marketing
7 7 (3.98%) Telecoms
8 4 (2.27%) Banking
9 3 (1.70%) Influencing Skills
9 3 (1.70%) Presentation Skills
10 2 (1.14%) Documentation Skills
10 2 (1.14%) Financial Institution
10 2 (1.14%) Retail
10 2 (1.14%) Social Science
11 1 (0.57%) Billing
11 1 (0.57%) Front Office
11 1 (0.57%) Local Government
11 1 (0.57%) Manufacturing
11 1 (0.57%) Private Banking
Job Titles
1 53 (30.11%) Data Scientist
2 31 (17.61%) Analyst
3 27 (15.34%) Data Analyst
3 27 (15.34%) Senior
4 19 (10.80%) Data Engineer
5 17 (9.66%) Developer
6 16 (9.09%) Senior Data Scientist
7 11 (6.25%) Lead
8 10 (5.68%) Architect
9 8 (4.55%) Consultant
10 6 (3.41%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
10 6 (3.41%) Business Intelligence Developer
10 6 (3.41%) Lead Data Scientist
11 5 (2.84%) Azure Engineer
11 5 (2.84%) Data Consultant
11 5 (2.84%) Java Developer
11 5 (2.84%) Power BI Developer
11 5 (2.84%) Senior Analyst
11 5 (2.84%) Software Engineer
12 4 (2.27%) Senior Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 13 (7.39%) TensorFlow
2 10 (5.68%) Pandas
2 10 (5.68%) PyTorch
3 9 (5.11%) PySpark
3 9 (5.11%) scikit-learn
4 8 (4.55%) JSON
5 6 (3.41%) Keras
5 6 (3.41%) Shiny
6 5 (2.84%) YAML
7 4 (2.27%) LangChain
7 4 (2.27%) Matplotlib
7 4 (2.27%) NumPy
7 4 (2.27%) Seaborn
8 3 (1.70%) FastAPI
8 3 (1.70%) Hugging Face
8 3 (1.70%) Kafka
8 3 (1.70%) Plotly
9 2 (1.14%) Node.js
9 2 (1.14%) SciPy
9 2 (1.14%) XML
Miscellaneous
1 16 (9.09%) Algorithms
2 8 (4.55%) Cloud Native
3 7 (3.98%) CRISPR
3 7 (3.98%) Product Ownership
4 5 (2.84%) Credit Risk
4 5 (2.84%) Self-Motivation
5 4 (2.27%) Data Structures
6 3 (1.70%) AI Agents
6 3 (1.70%) Data Protection Act
6 3 (1.70%) Hybrid Cloud
6 3 (1.70%) Management Information System
6 3 (1.70%) Multi-touch
6 3 (1.70%) Onboarding
7 2 (1.14%) Analytical Mindset
7 2 (1.14%) Distributed Computing
7 2 (1.14%) Distributed Systems
7 2 (1.14%) IoT
7 2 (1.14%) Mainframe
8 1 (0.57%) Data Fabric
8 1 (0.57%) Legacy Systems
Operating Systems
1 3 (1.70%) Linux
2 2 (1.14%) Unix
3 1 (0.57%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 95 (53.98%) Analytics
2 93 (52.84%) Data Science
3 75 (42.61%) Visualisation
4 69 (39.20%) Machine Learning
5 64 (36.36%) Business Intelligence
6 51 (28.98%) Decision-Making
7 43 (24.43%) Data Pipeline
8 42 (23.86%) Data Visualisation
9 41 (23.30%) Problem-Solving
10 38 (21.59%) Actionable Insight
11 37 (21.02%) Data Analysis
11 37 (21.02%) Data Modelling
12 36 (20.45%) Statistical Modelling
13 35 (19.89%) Agile
14 33 (18.75%) AI
15 32 (18.18%) Data Analytics
16 30 (17.05%) Data Governance
17 26 (14.77%) Statistics
18 25 (14.20%) Dashboard Development
18 25 (14.20%) Validation
Programming Languages
1 167 (94.89%) Python
2 130 (73.86%) SQL
3 13 (7.39%) Java
4 11 (6.25%) Data Analysis Expressions
5 7 (3.98%) JavaScript
5 7 (3.98%) Scala
6 6 (3.41%) C#
6 6 (3.41%) C++
7 3 (1.70%) TypeScript
8 2 (1.14%) Ada
8 2 (1.14%) VBA
9 1 (0.57%) LookML
9 1 (0.57%) SAS Macro
Qualifications
1 48 (27.27%) Security Cleared
2 41 (23.30%) SC Cleared
3 32 (18.18%) Degree
4 8 (4.55%) Computer Science Degree
5 6 (3.41%) Master's Degree
5 6 (3.41%) Microsoft Certification
6 5 (2.84%) PhD
7 4 (2.27%) BPSS Clearance
8 3 (1.70%) Azure Certification
9 2 (1.14%) Tableau Certification
10 1 (0.57%) CIMA
10 1 (0.57%) CTC Cleared
10 1 (0.57%) DBS Check
10 1 (0.57%) DV Cleared
10 1 (0.57%) Numerate Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 23 (13.07%) Data Quality
2 11 (6.25%) Actionable Recommendations
3 9 (5.11%) QA
4 7 (3.98%) GDPR
5 3 (1.70%) Accessibility
6 2 (1.14%) PCI DSS
6 2 (1.14%) WCAG
7 1 (0.57%) MiFID
7 1 (0.57%) Sarbanes-Oxley
System Software
1 5 (2.84%) Docker
2 2 (1.14%) HDFS
Systems Management
1 9 (5.11%) Kubernetes
2 6 (3.41%) Terraform
3 1 (0.57%) Progress Chef
Vendors
1 22 (12.50%) Databricks
2 17 (9.66%) Microsoft
3 7 (3.98%) Amplitude
4 5 (2.84%) OpenAI
4 5 (2.84%) Pega
5 4 (2.27%) Google
5 4 (2.27%) ServiceNow
6 3 (1.70%) Informatica
6 3 (1.70%) Oracle
6 3 (1.70%) Red Hat
6 3 (1.70%) SAP
7 2 (1.14%) Splunk
8 1 (0.57%) Adobe
8 1 (0.57%) Alteryx
8 1 (0.57%) Arqiva
8 1 (0.57%) Cognos
8 1 (0.57%) Salesforce
8 1 (0.57%) UiPath