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

6 months to
27 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 507 379 364
Rank change year-on-year -128 -15 +75
Contract jobs citing R 167 179 211
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.31% 0.55% 0.54%
As % of the Programming Languages category 1.19% 1.67% 1.72%
Number of daily rates quoted 118 103 134
10th Percentile £259 £315 £310
25th Percentile £406 £406 £361
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £463 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year -7.50% - -9.09%
75th Percentile £550 £575 £612
90th Percentile £650 £688 £684
UK excluding London median daily rate £425 £503 £550
% change year-on-year -15.42% -8.64% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 1 6 20
10th Percentile - £22.92 £20.11
25th Percentile - £23.81 £20.12
Median hourly rate £24.25 £26.91 £21.50
Median % change year-on-year -9.88% +25.16% -66.54%
75th Percentile - £36.25 £45.00
90th Percentile - £51.25 £56.13
UK excluding London median hourly rate - £22.92 £20.24
% change year-on-year - +13.27% -69.46%

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 14,022 10,725 12,235
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.12% 32.74% 31.51%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,124 7,149 8,472
10th Percentile £363 £343 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £519 £501 £530
Median % change year-on-year +3.70% -5.57% -3.64%
75th Percentile £620 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 519 299 376
10th Percentile £28.50 £28.25 £27.00
25th Percentile £49.50 £36.25 £46.14
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +5.11%
75th Percentile £70.00 £67.38 £70.00
90th Percentile £78.15 £79.00 £75.63
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £62.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +4.84% -4.62% +4.00%

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 27 August 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 27 August 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 -112 150 £458 -8.50% 104
London -66 94 £525 +2.44% 52
UK excluding London -111 57 £425 -15.42% 66
Work from Home -82 48 £525 +5.00% 45
South East -57 14 £525 +7.69% 11
South West -39 11 £450 -47.98% 12
East of England -30 9 £413 -23.26% 6
Yorkshire -43 9 £425 -5.56% 9
North of England -71 9 £425 +13.33% 22
Midlands -58 7 £450 -16.28% 9
West Midlands -51 5 £451 -16.19% 7
Scotland -14 4 £194 -64.66% 4
Northern Ireland +2 2 £363 +3.57%
East Midlands -17 2 £252 -43.51% 2
Wales -17 1 £490 +10.11% 2

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 18 (10.78%) Apache Spark
2 10 (5.99%) Apache
3 3 (1.80%) Apache Superset
3 3 (1.80%) Confluence
4 2 (1.20%) Jupyter
4 2 (1.20%) SAS
5 1 (0.60%) nginx
5 1 (0.60%) R Markdown
Applications
1 27 (16.17%) Microsoft Excel
2 2 (1.20%) Spreadsheet
3 1 (0.60%) Chatbot
3 1 (0.60%) CPLEX
3 1 (0.60%) SPSS
Business Applications
1 1 (0.60%) SAP APO
1 1 (0.60%) SAP IBP
Cloud Services
1 52 (31.14%) Power Platform
2 44 (26.35%) AWS
3 41 (24.55%) Azure
4 19 (11.38%) GCP
5 12 (7.19%) Snowflake
6 8 (4.79%) SaaS
7 7 (4.19%) Serverless
8 6 (3.59%) Azure DevOps
9 4 (2.40%) Amazon S3
9 4 (2.40%) Azure Synapse Analytics
9 4 (2.40%) GitHub
10 3 (1.80%) Amazon EKS
10 3 (1.80%) AWS CloudFormation
10 3 (1.80%) Azure Data Factory
10 3 (1.80%) dbt
10 3 (1.80%) Google Analytics
11 2 (1.20%) Cloud Functions
11 2 (1.20%) GitHub Actions
12 1 (0.60%) Dagster
12 1 (0.60%) Google Kubernetes Engine
Communications & Networking
1 2 (1.20%) DSL
2 1 (0.60%) DNS
2 1 (0.60%) HTTPS
2 1 (0.60%) Reverse Proxy
2 1 (0.60%) SSL
Database & Business Intelligence
1 51 (30.54%) Power BI
2 45 (26.95%) Tableau
3 17 (10.18%) Big Data
4 15 (8.98%) Data Warehouse
5 11 (6.59%) Relational Database
6 8 (4.79%) BigQuery
6 8 (4.79%) Hadoop
7 7 (4.19%) Power Query
8 5 (2.99%) Data Lake
9 4 (2.40%) Delta Lake
9 4 (2.40%) Looker
10 3 (1.80%) Amazon Athena
10 3 (1.80%) Apache Hive
10 3 (1.80%) Metadata
10 3 (1.80%) NoSQL
10 3 (1.80%) RDBMS
10 3 (1.80%) SQL Server
10 3 (1.80%) SQLPlus
11 2 (1.20%) PostgreSQL
11 2 (1.20%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 7 (4.19%) Git
2 6 (3.59%) GitLab
3 4 (2.40%) RStudio
4 3 (1.80%) Jenkins
4 3 (1.80%) JIRA
5 2 (1.20%) Cucumber
5 2 (1.20%) Gatling
5 2 (1.20%) JUnit
5 2 (1.20%) Selenium
6 1 (0.60%) Maven
6 1 (0.60%) Sonatype Nexus
General
1 66 (39.52%) Analytical Skills
2 37 (22.16%) Social Skills
3 31 (18.56%) Public Sector
4 24 (14.37%) Finance
5 13 (7.78%) Marketing
6 12 (7.19%) Pharmaceutical
7 10 (5.99%) Retail
8 8 (4.79%) Banking
9 7 (4.19%) Telecoms
10 5 (2.99%) Billing
10 5 (2.99%) Military
10 5 (2.99%) Presentation Skills
11 4 (2.40%) Front Office
11 4 (2.40%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 4 (2.40%) Influencing Skills
12 3 (1.80%) Organisational Skills
12 3 (1.80%) Publishing
13 2 (1.20%) Manufacturing
13 2 (1.20%) Police
14 1 (0.60%) Advertising
Job Titles
1 53 (31.74%) Analyst
2 40 (23.95%) Data Analyst
3 26 (15.57%) Data Scientist
4 14 (8.38%) Senior
5 12 (7.19%) Data Engineer
5 12 (7.19%) Developer
6 11 (6.59%) Architect
6 11 (6.59%) Lead
7 9 (5.39%) Consultant
7 9 (5.39%) SQL Analyst
7 9 (5.39%) Technical Analyst
8 7 (4.19%) Senior Analyst
9 6 (3.59%) Data Consultant
9 6 (3.59%) Senior Data Analyst
9 6 (3.59%) Software Engineer
9 6 (3.59%) SQL Data Analyst
10 5 (2.99%) Data Architect
10 5 (2.99%) Java Developer
10 5 (2.99%) Senior Data Scientist
11 4 (2.40%) Senior Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 11 (6.59%) Terraform
2 7 (4.19%) JSON
2 7 (4.19%) PySpark
2 7 (4.19%) PyTorch
2 7 (4.19%) TensorFlow
3 6 (3.59%) XML
4 4 (2.40%) .NET
4 4 (2.40%) Pandas
4 4 (2.40%) React
4 4 (2.40%) REST
5 3 (1.80%) NumPy
5 3 (1.80%) Shiny
5 3 (1.80%) YAML
6 2 (1.20%) FastAPI
6 2 (1.20%) JWT
6 2 (1.20%) Model Context Protocol
6 2 (1.20%) OpenTelemetry
6 2 (1.20%) Playwright
6 2 (1.20%) pytest
6 2 (1.20%) RabbitMQ
Miscellaneous
1 11 (6.59%) Algorithms
1 11 (6.59%) Onboarding
2 10 (5.99%) CRISPR
3 6 (3.59%) Data Structures
3 6 (3.59%) Legacy Systems
4 5 (2.99%) Data Protection Act
5 4 (2.40%) AI Agents
5 4 (2.40%) Analytical Mindset
5 4 (2.40%) Cloud Native
6 3 (1.80%) Product Ownership
7 2 (1.20%) BYOD
7 2 (1.20%) Credit Risk
7 2 (1.20%) Distributed Computing
7 2 (1.20%) Distributed Systems
7 2 (1.20%) Fixed Income
7 2 (1.20%) Legacy Applications
7 2 (1.20%) Mainframe
7 2 (1.20%) Social Media
7 2 (1.20%) Taxonomies
8 1 (0.60%) Equities
Operating Systems
1 5 (2.99%) Linux
2 2 (1.20%) Unix
3 1 (0.60%) Amazon Linux
3 1 (0.60%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
3 1 (0.60%) Ubuntu
3 1 (0.60%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 68 (40.72%) Analytics
2 60 (35.93%) Data Science
2 60 (35.93%) Visualisation
3 55 (32.93%) Business Intelligence
4 51 (30.54%) Data Pipeline
5 43 (25.75%) Actionable Insight
5 43 (25.75%) Machine Learning
6 41 (24.55%) Decision-Making
7 37 (22.16%) AI
8 34 (20.36%) Data Visualisation
9 32 (19.16%) Problem-Solving
9 32 (19.16%) Statistical Analysis
10 30 (17.96%) Agile
10 30 (17.96%) Validation
11 26 (15.57%) Mathematics
12 25 (14.97%) Statistical Modelling
13 24 (14.37%) Stakeholder Management
14 23 (13.77%) Data Engineering
15 21 (12.57%) Data Analysis
15 21 (12.57%) Data Analytics
Programming Languages
1 152 (91.02%) Python
2 97 (58.08%) SQL
3 17 (10.18%) Java
4 10 (5.99%) C++
5 7 (4.19%) C#
6 6 (3.59%) JavaScript
7 5 (2.99%) Data Analysis Expressions
8 4 (2.40%) Scala
9 2 (1.20%) Bash
9 2 (1.20%) Cypher
9 2 (1.20%) PowerShell
9 2 (1.20%) SHACL
9 2 (1.20%) TypeScript
10 1 (0.60%) MATLAB
10 1 (0.60%) Shell Script
10 1 (0.60%) T-SQL
10 1 (0.60%) VB
Qualifications
1 32 (19.16%) Security Cleared
2 26 (15.57%) SC Cleared
3 23 (13.77%) Degree
4 5 (2.99%) BPSS Clearance
5 4 (2.40%) Computer Science Degree
6 2 (1.20%) Master's Degree
6 2 (1.20%) Microsoft Certification
6 2 (1.20%) Microsoft Certified Professional
6 2 (1.20%) PhD
6 2 (1.20%) Tableau Certification
7 1 (0.60%) DV Cleared
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 23 (13.77%) Data Quality
2 15 (8.98%) QA
3 6 (3.59%) Accessibility
4 4 (2.40%) SLA
5 3 (1.80%) Actionable Recommendations
5 3 (1.80%) GDPR
5 3 (1.80%) WCAG
6 2 (1.20%) California Consumer Privacy Act
6 2 (1.20%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 1 (0.60%) Disclosure Scotland
7 1 (0.60%) IFRS
7 1 (0.60%) IFRS 17
System Software
1 5 (2.99%) Docker
2 1 (0.60%) Active Directory
Systems Management
1 8 (4.79%) Kubernetes
2 3 (1.80%) Grafana
3 2 (1.20%) Ansible
3 2 (1.20%) Argo
4 1 (0.60%) Prometheus
4 1 (0.60%) Single Sign-On
4 1 (0.60%) systemd
Vendors
1 19 (11.38%) Databricks
1 19 (11.38%) Microsoft
2 7 (4.19%) Google
3 4 (2.40%) Oracle
4 3 (1.80%) OpenAI
5 2 (1.20%) Amplitude
5 2 (1.20%) FactSet
5 2 (1.20%) IBM
5 2 (1.20%) Sonatype
6 1 (0.60%) Alteryx
6 1 (0.60%) Pega
6 1 (0.60%) Red Hat
6 1 (0.60%) SAP