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

6 months to
20 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 510 369 363
Rank change year-on-year -141 -6 +68
Contract jobs citing R 158 186 206
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.30% 0.57% 0.53%
As % of the Programming Languages category 1.12% 1.72% 1.69%
Number of daily rates quoted 115 113 132
10th Percentile £267 £315 £310
25th Percentile £406 £405 £362
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £469 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year -6.30% - -9.09%
75th Percentile £563 £575 £610
90th Percentile £650 £688 £675
UK excluding London median daily rate £431 £500 £550
% change year-on-year -13.80% -9.09% -
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% -67.42%
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% -71.09%

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 14,055 10,816 12,201
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.27% 32.94% 31.46%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,153 7,227 8,516
10th Percentile £363 £340 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £518 £503 £535
Median % change year-on-year +2.99% -6.07% -2.73%
75th Percentile £619 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £495 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +4.21% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 520 288 395
10th Percentile £29.96 £28.23 £27.00
25th Percentile £50.00 £35.00 £43.50
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +8.33%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.55 £80.00 £77.80
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +3.17% -3.08% +8.33%

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 20 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 20 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 -148 143 £465 -7.00% 305
London -81 88 £525 +5.00% 159
UK excluding London -133 54 £431 -13.80% 212
Work from Home -84 49 £550 +11.11% 95
South East -60 13 £513 +7.89% 62
South West -35 11 £450 -47.98% 19
East of England -27 9 £413 -23.26% 23
Yorkshire -34 9 £425 -5.56% 20
North of England -58 9 £425 +13.33% 55
Midlands -60 7 £450 -16.28% 28
West Midlands -56 5 £451 -16.19% 14
Northern Ireland +7 2 £363 +3.57% 3
Scotland -16 2 £190 -65.45% 16
East Midlands -19 2 £252 -43.51% 14
Wales -18 1 £490 +10.11% 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 18 (11.39%) Apache Spark
2 10 (6.33%) Apache
3 3 (1.90%) Apache Superset
3 3 (1.90%) Confluence
4 2 (1.27%) Jupyter
4 2 (1.27%) SAS
5 1 (0.63%) nginx
5 1 (0.63%) R Markdown
Applications
1 20 (12.66%) Microsoft Excel
2 2 (1.27%) Spreadsheet
3 1 (0.63%) Chatbot
3 1 (0.63%) CPLEX
3 1 (0.63%) SPSS
Business Applications
1 1 (0.63%) SAP APO
1 1 (0.63%) SAP IBP
Cloud Services
1 46 (29.11%) AWS
2 45 (28.48%) Power Platform
3 41 (25.95%) Azure
4 18 (11.39%) GCP
5 12 (7.59%) Snowflake
6 7 (4.43%) SaaS
7 6 (3.80%) Azure DevOps
7 6 (3.80%) Serverless
8 4 (2.53%) Amazon S3
8 4 (2.53%) Azure Synapse Analytics
8 4 (2.53%) dbt
8 4 (2.53%) GitHub
9 3 (1.90%) Amazon EKS
9 3 (1.90%) AWS CloudFormation
9 3 (1.90%) Azure Data Factory
10 2 (1.27%) Cloud Functions
10 2 (1.27%) GitHub Actions
10 2 (1.27%) Google Analytics
11 1 (0.63%) Amazon EC2
11 1 (0.63%) Cloud Computing
Communications & Networking
1 2 (1.27%) DSL
2 1 (0.63%) DNS
2 1 (0.63%) HTTPS
2 1 (0.63%) Reverse Proxy
2 1 (0.63%) SSL
Database & Business Intelligence
1 44 (27.85%) Power BI
2 41 (25.95%) Tableau
3 17 (10.76%) Big Data
4 16 (10.13%) Data Warehouse
5 11 (6.96%) Relational Database
6 8 (5.06%) Hadoop
7 7 (4.43%) BigQuery
8 5 (3.16%) Data Lake
8 5 (3.16%) Power Query
9 3 (1.90%) Amazon Athena
9 3 (1.90%) Apache Hive
9 3 (1.90%) Delta Lake
9 3 (1.90%) Looker
9 3 (1.90%) Metadata
9 3 (1.90%) NoSQL
9 3 (1.90%) RDBMS
9 3 (1.90%) SQL Server
9 3 (1.90%) SQLPlus
10 2 (1.27%) PostgreSQL
10 2 (1.27%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 7 (4.43%) Git
2 6 (3.80%) GitLab
3 3 (1.90%) Jenkins
3 3 (1.90%) JIRA
3 3 (1.90%) RStudio
4 2 (1.27%) Cucumber
4 2 (1.27%) Gatling
4 2 (1.27%) JUnit
4 2 (1.27%) Selenium
5 1 (0.63%) Maven
5 1 (0.63%) Sonatype Nexus
General
1 59 (37.34%) Analytical Skills
2 32 (20.25%) Social Skills
3 29 (18.35%) Public Sector
4 20 (12.66%) Finance
5 12 (7.59%) Pharmaceutical
6 11 (6.96%) Marketing
7 8 (5.06%) Retail
8 7 (4.43%) Telecoms
9 5 (3.16%) Banking
10 4 (2.53%) Billing
10 4 (2.53%) Front Office
10 4 (2.53%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 3 (1.90%) Influencing Skills
11 3 (1.90%) Military
11 3 (1.90%) Presentation Skills
11 3 (1.90%) Publishing
12 2 (1.27%) Manufacturing
12 2 (1.27%) Organisational Skills
12 2 (1.27%) Police
13 1 (0.63%) Advertising
Job Titles
1 44 (27.85%) Analyst
2 32 (20.25%) Data Analyst
3 27 (17.09%) Data Scientist
4 15 (9.49%) Senior
5 13 (8.23%) Data Engineer
6 12 (7.59%) Developer
7 11 (6.96%) Lead
8 10 (6.33%) Architect
9 9 (5.70%) Consultant
9 9 (5.70%) SQL Analyst
9 9 (5.70%) Technical Analyst
10 7 (4.43%) Senior Analyst
10 7 (4.43%) Software Engineer
11 6 (3.80%) Data Consultant
11 6 (3.80%) Senior Data Analyst
11 6 (3.80%) Senior Data Scientist
11 6 (3.80%) SQL Data Analyst
12 5 (3.16%) Data Architect
12 5 (3.16%) Java Developer
13 4 (2.53%) Senior Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 12 (7.59%) Terraform
2 8 (5.06%) PyTorch
2 8 (5.06%) TensorFlow
3 7 (4.43%) JSON
4 6 (3.80%) XML
5 5 (3.16%) PySpark
6 4 (2.53%) .NET
6 4 (2.53%) Pandas
6 4 (2.53%) React
7 3 (1.90%) NumPy
7 3 (1.90%) REST
7 3 (1.90%) Shiny
7 3 (1.90%) YAML
8 2 (1.27%) AngularJS
8 2 (1.27%) FastAPI
8 2 (1.27%) JWT
8 2 (1.27%) Model Context Protocol
8 2 (1.27%) OpenTelemetry
8 2 (1.27%) Playwright
8 2 (1.27%) WebSockets
Miscellaneous
1 12 (7.59%) Algorithms
2 10 (6.33%) CRISPR
3 9 (5.70%) Onboarding
4 6 (3.80%) Legacy Systems
5 5 (3.16%) Cloud Native
5 5 (3.16%) Data Protection Act
6 4 (2.53%) AI Agents
6 4 (2.53%) Analytical Mindset
6 4 (2.53%) Product Ownership
7 2 (1.27%) BYOD
7 2 (1.27%) Credit Risk
7 2 (1.27%) Distributed Computing
7 2 (1.27%) Distributed Systems
7 2 (1.27%) Fixed Income
7 2 (1.27%) Legacy Applications
7 2 (1.27%) Mainframe
7 2 (1.27%) Social Media
7 2 (1.27%) Taxonomies
8 1 (0.63%) Derivative
8 1 (0.63%) Equities
Operating Systems
1 5 (3.16%) Linux
2 2 (1.27%) Unix
3 1 (0.63%) Amazon Linux
3 1 (0.63%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
3 1 (0.63%) Ubuntu
3 1 (0.63%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 63 (39.87%) Analytics
2 60 (37.97%) Data Science
3 57 (36.08%) Visualisation
4 49 (31.01%) Data Pipeline
5 46 (29.11%) Business Intelligence
6 43 (27.22%) Machine Learning
7 40 (25.32%) Actionable Insight
7 40 (25.32%) Decision-Making
8 37 (23.42%) AI
9 32 (20.25%) Agile
10 31 (19.62%) Data Visualisation
10 31 (19.62%) Statistical Analysis
11 30 (18.99%) Problem-Solving
12 27 (17.09%) Validation
13 26 (16.46%) Mathematics
14 25 (15.82%) Statistical Modelling
15 22 (13.92%) Data Engineering
16 21 (13.29%) Stakeholder Management
16 21 (13.29%) Statistics
17 20 (12.66%) ETL
Programming Languages
1 143 (90.51%) Python
2 92 (58.23%) SQL
3 17 (10.76%) Java
4 10 (6.33%) C++
5 7 (4.43%) C#
6 6 (3.80%) JavaScript
7 5 (3.16%) Data Analysis Expressions
8 4 (2.53%) Scala
9 3 (1.90%) TypeScript
10 2 (1.27%) Bash
10 2 (1.27%) Cypher
10 2 (1.27%) PowerShell
10 2 (1.27%) SHACL
11 1 (0.63%) MATLAB
11 1 (0.63%) Shell Script
11 1 (0.63%) T-SQL
11 1 (0.63%) VB
Qualifications
1 31 (19.62%) Security Cleared
2 26 (16.46%) SC Cleared
3 22 (13.92%) Degree
4 4 (2.53%) BPSS Clearance
4 4 (2.53%) Computer Science Degree
5 3 (1.90%) PhD
6 2 (1.27%) Master's Degree
6 2 (1.27%) Microsoft Certification
6 2 (1.27%) Microsoft Certified Professional
6 2 (1.27%) Tableau Certification
7 1 (0.63%) DV Cleared
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 19 (12.03%) Data Quality
2 11 (6.96%) QA
3 6 (3.80%) Accessibility
4 3 (1.90%) Actionable Recommendations
4 3 (1.90%) GDPR
4 3 (1.90%) SLA
4 3 (1.90%) WCAG
5 2 (1.27%) California Consumer Privacy Act
6 1 (0.63%) MiFID
6 1 (0.63%) Sarbanes-Oxley
System Software
1 5 (3.16%) Docker
2 1 (0.63%) Active Directory
Systems Management
1 10 (6.33%) Kubernetes
2 3 (1.90%) Grafana
3 2 (1.27%) Ansible
3 2 (1.27%) Argo
4 1 (0.63%) Prometheus
4 1 (0.63%) Single Sign-On
4 1 (0.63%) systemd
Vendors
1 18 (11.39%) Databricks
2 17 (10.76%) Microsoft
3 6 (3.80%) Google
4 4 (2.53%) Oracle
5 3 (1.90%) OpenAI
6 2 (1.27%) Amplitude
6 2 (1.27%) FactSet
6 2 (1.27%) IBM
6 2 (1.27%) Red Hat
6 2 (1.27%) Sonatype
7 1 (0.63%) Alteryx
7 1 (0.63%) Pega
7 1 (0.63%) SAP