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

6 months to
17 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 521 373 354
Rank change year-on-year -148 -19 +57
Contract jobs citing R 160 187 225
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.29% 0.57% 0.59%
As % of the Programming Languages category 1.12% 1.73% 1.84%
Number of daily rates quoted 107 107 129
10th Percentile £259 £315 £308
25th Percentile £400 £409 £350
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £465 £500 £475
Median % change year-on-year -7.00% +5.26% -13.64%
75th Percentile £555 £588 £600
90th Percentile £650 £688 £665
UK excluding London median daily rate £431 £519 £513
% change year-on-year -16.92% +1.22% -2.38%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1 4 19
10th Percentile - £23.86 £20.09
25th Percentile - £25.40 £20.12
Median hourly rate £24.25 £32.50 £21.50
Median % change year-on-year -25.38% +51.16% -60.91%
75th Percentile - £45.00 £39.00
90th Percentile - £56.25 £58.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate - £22.84 £20.24
% change year-on-year - +12.87% -66.96%

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 14,245 10,791 12,230
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.06% 32.76% 31.98%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,249 7,144 8,276
10th Percentile £363 £343 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £523 £501 £525
Median % change year-on-year +4.40% -4.67% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £738 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 542 293 341
10th Percentile £27.75 £29.00 £27.00
25th Percentile £48.16 £37.77 £46.18
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +4.00%
75th Percentile £70.00 £67.25 £70.00
90th Percentile £82.03 £80.00 £78.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £64.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year +0.78% -0.77% -

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 September 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 17 September 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 -145 145 £465 -7.00% 722
London -82 94 £525 - 425
UK excluding London -137 54 £431 -16.92% 361
Work from Home -87 42 £537 +4.78% 241
South East -76 13 £500 - 95
South West -40 10 £450 -47.98% 30
Yorkshire -41 8 £425 -5.56% 34
East of England -44 8 £413 -26.67% 54
North of England -81 8 £425 +21.43% 85
Midlands -53 7 £450 -18.18% 53
West Midlands -53 5 £451 -18.09% 26
Scotland -22 4 £194 -64.66% 22
Northern Ireland +4 2 £363 +3.57% 16
East Midlands -10 2 £252 -43.51% 27
Wales -15 2 £490 +30.23% 9

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 12 (7.50%) Apache Spark
2 6 (3.75%) Apache
3 3 (1.88%) Confluence
3 3 (1.88%) Jupyter
4 2 (1.25%) Apache Airflow
4 2 (1.25%) Apache Superset
4 2 (1.25%) SAS
5 1 (0.63%) Microsoft Exchange
5 1 (0.63%) nginx
5 1 (0.63%) R Markdown
Applications
1 26 (16.25%) Microsoft Excel
2 2 (1.25%) Spreadsheet
3 1 (0.63%) CPLEX
3 1 (0.63%) Microsoft Office
3 1 (0.63%) SPSS
Business Applications
1 1 (0.63%) Monis
1 1 (0.63%) SAP APO
1 1 (0.63%) SAP IBP
Cloud Services
1 49 (30.63%) Power Platform
2 41 (25.63%) AWS
3 38 (23.75%) Azure
4 19 (11.88%) GCP
5 13 (8.13%) Snowflake
6 9 (5.63%) SaaS
7 8 (5.00%) Serverless
8 7 (4.38%) Azure DevOps
9 5 (3.13%) Amazon S3
9 5 (3.13%) Azure Databricks
9 5 (3.13%) GitHub
10 4 (2.50%) dbt
11 3 (1.88%) Google Analytics
12 2 (1.25%) Amazon EKS
12 2 (1.25%) AWS CloudFormation
12 2 (1.25%) Azure Synapse Analytics
12 2 (1.25%) Cloud Functions
12 2 (1.25%) Dagster
12 2 (1.25%) GitHub Actions
13 1 (0.63%) AWS KMS
Communications & Networking
1 2 (1.25%) DSL
2 1 (0.63%) Cisco IOS
2 1 (0.63%) DNS
2 1 (0.63%) HTTPS
2 1 (0.63%) Reverse Proxy
2 1 (0.63%) SSL
2 1 (0.63%) VPN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 48 (30.00%) Power BI
2 41 (25.63%) Tableau
3 14 (8.75%) Data Warehouse
4 12 (7.50%) Big Data
5 10 (6.25%) Relational Database
6 9 (5.63%) BigQuery
7 6 (3.75%) Looker
8 5 (3.13%) Delta Lake
8 5 (3.13%) Power Query
9 4 (2.50%) Data Lake
9 4 (2.50%) Metadata
10 3 (1.88%) Amazon Athena
10 3 (1.88%) Apache Hive
10 3 (1.88%) Hadoop
10 3 (1.88%) NoSQL
10 3 (1.88%) PostgreSQL
10 3 (1.88%) RDBMS
10 3 (1.88%) SQLPlus
11 2 (1.25%) MongoDB
11 2 (1.25%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 8 (5.00%) Git
2 7 (4.38%) GitLab
3 6 (3.75%) RStudio
4 3 (1.88%) Jenkins
4 3 (1.88%) JIRA
5 2 (1.25%) Cucumber
5 2 (1.25%) Gatling
5 2 (1.25%) JUnit
5 2 (1.25%) Selenium
6 1 (0.63%) Maven
6 1 (0.63%) Sonatype Nexus
General
1 61 (38.13%) Analytical Skills
2 36 (22.50%) Social Skills
3 30 (18.75%) Public Sector
4 26 (16.25%) Finance
5 13 (8.13%) Marketing
6 10 (6.25%) Retail
7 9 (5.63%) Banking
7 9 (5.63%) Pharmaceutical
8 7 (4.38%) Billing
8 7 (4.38%) Telecoms
9 5 (3.13%) Military
9 5 (3.13%) Presentation Skills
10 4 (2.50%) Front Office
10 4 (2.50%) Influencing Skills
11 3 (1.88%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 3 (1.88%) Organisational Skills
11 3 (1.88%) Publishing
12 2 (1.25%) Advertising
12 2 (1.25%) Manufacturing
12 2 (1.25%) Police
Job Titles
1 55 (34.38%) Analyst
2 41 (25.63%) Data Analyst
3 21 (13.13%) Data Scientist
4 17 (10.63%) Senior
5 14 (8.75%) Data Engineer
6 11 (6.88%) Architect
7 10 (6.25%) Lead
7 10 (6.25%) SQL Analyst
8 9 (5.63%) Technical Analyst
9 8 (5.00%) Consultant
9 8 (5.00%) Developer
10 7 (4.38%) Senior Analyst
10 7 (4.38%) SQL Data Analyst
11 6 (3.75%) Senior Data Analyst
11 6 (3.75%) Software Engineer
12 5 (3.13%) Data Architect
12 5 (3.13%) Data Consultant
13 4 (2.50%) Platform Architect
13 4 (2.50%) Senior Data Scientist
13 4 (2.50%) Senior Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 10 (6.25%) Terraform
2 8 (5.00%) PySpark
3 6 (3.75%) XML
4 5 (3.13%) PyTorch
4 5 (3.13%) REST
4 5 (3.13%) TensorFlow
5 4 (2.50%) .NET
5 4 (2.50%) JSON
5 4 (2.50%) React
6 3 (1.88%) Pandas
6 3 (1.88%) YAML
7 2 (1.25%) AngularJS
7 2 (1.25%) Apache Avro
7 2 (1.25%) Bootstrap
7 2 (1.25%) NumPy
7 2 (1.25%) OLE
7 2 (1.25%) pytest
7 2 (1.25%) RabbitMQ
7 2 (1.25%) Shiny
7 2 (1.25%) WebSockets
Miscellaneous
1 12 (7.50%) Onboarding
2 9 (5.63%) Algorithms
3 8 (5.00%) CRISPR
4 7 (4.38%) Data Structures
5 6 (3.75%) Legacy Systems
6 5 (3.13%) Cloud Native
6 5 (3.13%) Data Protection Act
7 4 (2.50%) Analytical Mindset
8 3 (1.88%) AI Agents
8 3 (1.88%) BYOD
8 3 (1.88%) Product Ownership
8 3 (1.88%) Social Media
8 3 (1.88%) Taxonomies
9 2 (1.25%) Credit Risk
9 2 (1.25%) Fixed Income
9 2 (1.25%) Legacy Applications
9 2 (1.25%) Mainframe
9 2 (1.25%) Reinsurance
10 1 (0.63%) Data Fabric
10 1 (0.63%) Distributed Computing
Operating Systems
1 5 (3.13%) Linux
2 2 (1.25%) Unix
2 2 (1.25%) Windows
3 1 (0.63%) Amazon Linux
3 1 (0.63%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
3 1 (0.63%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 69 (43.13%) Analytics
2 56 (35.00%) Data Science
3 53 (33.13%) Visualisation
4 51 (31.88%) Business Intelligence
5 47 (29.38%) Data Pipeline
6 41 (25.63%) Actionable Insight
7 40 (25.00%) Decision-Making
8 39 (24.38%) Machine Learning
9 37 (23.13%) AI
10 32 (20.00%) Agile
11 31 (19.38%) Validation
12 30 (18.75%) Data Visualisation
12 30 (18.75%) Statistical Analysis
13 29 (18.13%) Problem-Solving
14 25 (15.63%) Data Engineering
14 25 (15.63%) Stakeholder Management
15 23 (14.38%) Mathematics
15 23 (14.38%) Statistical Modelling
16 21 (13.13%) Data Analytics
16 21 (13.13%) ETL
Programming Languages
1 143 (89.38%) Python
2 90 (56.25%) SQL
3 12 (7.50%) Java
4 10 (6.25%) C++
5 7 (4.38%) C#
6 6 (3.75%) JavaScript
7 5 (3.13%) Scala
8 3 (1.88%) Data Analysis Expressions
9 2 (1.25%) Bash
9 2 (1.25%) Cypher
9 2 (1.25%) PowerShell
9 2 (1.25%) SHACL
9 2 (1.25%) TypeScript
10 1 (0.63%) MATLAB
10 1 (0.63%) Shell Script
10 1 (0.63%) T-SQL
10 1 (0.63%) VB
Qualifications
1 27 (16.88%) Security Cleared
2 22 (13.75%) Degree
3 21 (13.13%) SC Cleared
4 5 (3.13%) BPSS Clearance
5 3 (1.88%) PhD
6 2 (1.25%) Computer Science Degree
6 2 (1.25%) Microsoft Certified Professional
7 1 (0.63%) DV Cleared
7 1 (0.63%) Master's Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 26 (16.25%) Data Quality
2 15 (9.38%) QA
3 5 (3.13%) Accessibility
3 5 (3.13%) SLA
4 4 (2.50%) Actionable Recommendations
5 3 (1.88%) GDPR
5 3 (1.88%) WCAG
6 2 (1.25%) California Consumer Privacy Act
6 2 (1.25%) IFRS
6 2 (1.25%) IFRS 17
6 2 (1.25%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 1 (0.63%) Disclosure Scotland
System Software
1 5 (3.13%) Docker
2 1 (0.63%) Active Directory
Systems Management
1 7 (4.38%) Kubernetes
2 3 (1.88%) Grafana
3 2 (1.25%) Ansible
3 2 (1.25%) Argo
4 1 (0.63%) Microsoft Intune
4 1 (0.63%) Prometheus
4 1 (0.63%) Single Sign-On
4 1 (0.63%) systemd
Vendors
1 20 (12.50%) Databricks
2 18 (11.25%) Microsoft
3 8 (5.00%) Google
4 4 (2.50%) Oracle
5 3 (1.88%) FactSet
6 2 (1.25%) Amplitude
6 2 (1.25%) IBM
6 2 (1.25%) OpenAI
6 2 (1.25%) Sonatype
7 1 (0.63%) Adobe
7 1 (0.63%) Alteryx
7 1 (0.63%) Apple
7 1 (0.63%) Bloomberg
7 1 (0.63%) Cisco
7 1 (0.63%) Pega
7 1 (0.63%) Red Hat
7 1 (0.63%) Reuters
7 1 (0.63%) Riverbed
7 1 (0.63%) SAP