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

6 months to
15 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 431 341 377
Rank change year-on-year -90 +36 +34
Contract jobs citing R 165 199 230
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.41% 0.64% 0.51%
As % of the Programming Languages category 1.37% 1.91% 1.74%
Number of daily rates quoted 98 109 162
10th Percentile £310 £291 £313
25th Percentile £413 £381 £377
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £510 £513 £525
Median % change year-on-year -0.49% -2.38% -4.55%
75th Percentile £600 £663 £634
90th Percentile £688 £800 £763
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £468 £400
% change year-on-year +6.95% +16.88% -11.11%
Number of hourly rates quoted 7 5 15
10th Percentile £23.32 £21.75 £25.37
25th Percentile £27.60 £22.50 £25.87
Median hourly rate £32.50 £52.50 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year -38.10% +23.53% +41.67%
75th Percentile £54.88 £58.75 £48.13
90th Percentile £60.33 £59.95 £51.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £30.00 - £36.43
% change year-on-year - - +64.40%

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 12,058 10,396 13,247
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 30.18% 33.64% 29.54%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,013 6,637 9,362
10th Percentile £350 £356 £350
25th Percentile £413 £420 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £535
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -1.87% -4.89%
75th Percentile £613 £638 £650
90th Percentile £720 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £478 £485 £500
% change year-on-year -1.44% -3.00% -2.44%
Number of hourly rates quoted 468 233 508
10th Percentile £40.00 £21.40 £35.52
25th Percentile £52.50 £36.75 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +4.17% -7.69%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.75 £62.50
% change year-on-year +1.97% +1.99% -3.85%

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 15 February 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 15 February 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 15 February 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 -107 143 £513 -2.38% 213
London -38 74 £543 -1.27% 69
UK excluding London -94 63 £500 +6.95% 198
Work from Home -2 57 £531 +3.51% 60
South East -30 19 £600 +18.52% 58
Midlands -49 17 £395 +10.96% 28
North of England -61 13 £500 +40.45% 51
East Midlands -21 11 £385 +20.88% 16
North West -27 11 £513 +44.14% 25
East of England -27 7 £641 -1.38% 22
West Midlands -45 6 £438 +12.90% 12
Wales 0 4 £366 - 6
South West -34 3 - - 20
North East -15 1 £475 - 8
Yorkshire - 1 - - 19

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 28 (16.97%) Apache Spark
2 15 (9.09%) SAS
3 8 (4.85%) SharePoint
4 6 (3.64%) Apache
5 5 (3.03%) Apache Airflow
6 1 (0.61%) Apache Superset
6 1 (0.61%) Confluence
6 1 (0.61%) Jupyter
Applications
1 18 (10.91%) Microsoft Excel
2 5 (3.03%) Microsoft Office
2 5 (3.03%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 1 (0.61%) ProjectWise
Business Applications
1 1 (0.61%) Salesforce CRM
1 1 (0.61%) SAP ERP
1 1 (0.61%) SAP IBP
1 1 (0.61%) SAP S/4HANA
1 1 (0.61%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 60 (36.36%) Power Platform
2 45 (27.27%) Azure
3 42 (25.45%) AWS
4 21 (12.73%) GCP
5 8 (4.85%) Power Automate
5 8 (4.85%) PowerApps
5 8 (4.85%) Snowflake
6 5 (3.03%) Azure Machine Learning
6 5 (3.03%) Azure Synapse Analytics
6 5 (3.03%) Microsoft Purview
7 4 (2.42%) Azure AKS
7 4 (2.42%) Azure Data Factory
7 4 (2.42%) Azure DevOps
7 4 (2.42%) dbt
8 3 (1.82%) Amazon Bedrock
8 3 (1.82%) Copilot Studio
9 2 (1.21%) Amazon EMR
9 2 (1.21%) Amazon Kinesis
9 2 (1.21%) Amazon SageMaker
9 2 (1.21%) OpenShift
Communications & Networking
1 2 (1.21%) 2G
1 2 (1.21%) 5G
1 2 (1.21%) LTE
1 2 (1.21%) Mobile Backhaul
1 2 (1.21%) VoIP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 60 (36.36%) Power BI
2 43 (26.06%) Tableau
3 27 (16.36%) Big Data
4 20 (12.12%) Hadoop
5 18 (10.91%) Data Warehouse
6 12 (7.27%) Looker
7 9 (5.45%) Data Lake
8 7 (4.24%) Data Mining
8 7 (4.24%) Delta Lake
8 7 (4.24%) Metadata
8 7 (4.24%) NoSQL
8 7 (4.24%) Power Query
9 6 (3.64%) Mixpanel
9 6 (3.64%) Relational Database
9 6 (3.64%) Spark SQL
10 5 (3.03%) Amazon Redshift
10 5 (3.03%) SQL Server
11 3 (1.82%) BigQuery
12 2 (1.21%) Azure SQL Database
12 2 (1.21%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 12 (7.27%) Git
2 6 (3.64%) Jenkins
3 2 (1.21%) GoCD
3 2 (1.21%) MLflow
3 2 (1.21%) RStudio
3 2 (1.21%) SonarQube
3 2 (1.21%) Sonatype Nexus
3 2 (1.21%) TeamCity
4 1 (0.61%) Bitbucket
4 1 (0.61%) JIRA
4 1 (0.61%) Maven
General
1 58 (35.15%) Social Skills
2 50 (30.30%) Analytical Skills
3 42 (25.45%) Finance
4 24 (14.55%) Public Sector
5 14 (8.48%) Marketing
6 12 (7.27%) Pharmaceutical
7 9 (5.45%) Banking
7 9 (5.45%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 6 (3.64%) Organisational Skills
9 4 (2.42%) Manufacturing
10 3 (1.82%) Telecoms
11 2 (1.21%) Documentation Skills
11 2 (1.21%) Influencing Skills
11 2 (1.21%) Presentation Skills
12 1 (0.61%) Agriculture
12 1 (0.61%) Agrochemical
12 1 (0.61%) Local Government
12 1 (0.61%) Private Banking
12 1 (0.61%) Retail
12 1 (0.61%) Social Science
Job Titles
1 50 (30.30%) Data Scientist
2 31 (18.79%) Analyst
3 24 (14.55%) Data Analyst
4 23 (13.94%) Senior
5 18 (10.91%) Data Engineer
6 15 (9.09%) Developer
6 15 (9.09%) Senior Data Scientist
7 13 (7.88%) Architect
8 10 (6.06%) Lead
9 7 (4.24%) Business Intelligence Developer
9 7 (4.24%) Software Engineer
10 6 (3.64%) Business Analyst
10 6 (3.64%) Power BI Developer
11 5 (3.03%) Azure Engineer
11 5 (3.03%) Consultant
11 5 (3.03%) Lead Data Scientist
12 4 (2.42%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 4 (2.42%) Data Analytics Engineer
13 3 (1.82%) SQL Analyst
13 3 (1.82%) SQL Data Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 14 (8.48%) TensorFlow
2 12 (7.27%) scikit-learn
3 11 (6.67%) PyTorch
4 9 (5.45%) Pandas
5 8 (4.85%) PySpark
6 6 (3.64%) Kafka
7 5 (3.03%) Keras
7 5 (3.03%) YAML
8 4 (2.42%) LangChain
9 3 (1.82%) FastAPI
9 3 (1.82%) Hugging Face
9 3 (1.82%) JSON
9 3 (1.82%) Shiny
10 2 (1.21%) Matplotlib
10 2 (1.21%) NLTK
10 2 (1.21%) Node.js
10 2 (1.21%) NumPy
10 2 (1.21%) SciPy
10 2 (1.21%) Seaborn
10 2 (1.21%) XGBoost
Miscellaneous
1 12 (7.27%) Algorithms
1 12 (7.27%) Credit Risk
2 7 (4.24%) Cloud Native
2 7 (4.24%) Data Structures
3 5 (3.03%) Product Ownership
3 5 (3.03%) Self-Motivation
4 3 (1.82%) IoT
4 3 (1.82%) Management Information System
4 3 (1.82%) Multi-touch
4 3 (1.82%) NHS
5 2 (1.21%) AI Agents
5 2 (1.21%) CRISPR
5 2 (1.21%) Genomics
5 2 (1.21%) Hybrid Cloud
5 2 (1.21%) Mobile App
5 2 (1.21%) Onboarding
6 1 (0.61%) Data Fabric
6 1 (0.61%) Distributed Computing
6 1 (0.61%) Legacy Systems
6 1 (0.61%) Virtual Reality
Operating Systems
1 2 (1.21%) Linux
2 1 (0.61%) Unix
2 1 (0.61%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 90 (54.55%) Data Science
2 87 (52.73%) Analytics
3 73 (44.24%) Machine Learning
4 66 (40.00%) Visualisation
5 57 (34.55%) Business Intelligence
6 46 (27.88%) Decision-Making
7 40 (24.24%) Data Analysis
8 37 (22.42%) Problem-Solving
9 35 (21.21%) Statistical Modelling
10 33 (20.00%) Data Modelling
10 33 (20.00%) Data Visualisation
11 32 (19.39%) Agile
11 32 (19.39%) Data Governance
12 31 (18.79%) Actionable Insight
13 27 (16.36%) AI
13 27 (16.36%) Data Pipeline
14 24 (14.55%) Validation
15 23 (13.94%) Data Analytics
16 22 (13.33%) Dashboard Development
17 21 (12.73%) CI/CD
Programming Languages
1 156 (94.55%) Python
2 117 (70.91%) SQL
3 13 (7.88%) Java
4 9 (5.45%) Data Analysis Expressions
5 8 (4.85%) Scala
6 7 (4.24%) C++
7 6 (3.64%) JavaScript
8 3 (1.82%) C#
9 2 (1.21%) Ada
9 2 (1.21%) Go
9 2 (1.21%) PL/SQL
9 2 (1.21%) Rust
9 2 (1.21%) TypeScript
9 2 (1.21%) VBA
10 1 (0.61%) Bash
10 1 (0.61%) LookML
10 1 (0.61%) MATLAB
10 1 (0.61%) SAS Macro
Qualifications
1 34 (20.61%) Security Cleared
2 30 (18.18%) Degree
3 27 (16.36%) SC Cleared
4 8 (4.85%) Computer Science Degree
5 6 (3.64%) BPSS Clearance
5 6 (3.64%) Master's Degree
6 5 (3.03%) PhD
7 4 (2.42%) Microsoft Certification
8 3 (1.82%) Azure Certification
9 1 (0.61%) CIMA
9 1 (0.61%) CTC Cleared
9 1 (0.61%) DBS Check
9 1 (0.61%) GIAC
9 1 (0.61%) Numerate Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 22 (13.33%) Data Quality
2 10 (6.06%) Actionable Recommendations
3 7 (4.24%) GDPR
3 7 (4.24%) QA
4 2 (1.21%) PCI DSS
5 1 (0.61%) Accessibility
5 1 (0.61%) Sarbanes-Oxley
5 1 (0.61%) WCAG
System Software
1 10 (6.06%) Docker
2 2 (1.21%) HDFS
Systems Management
1 11 (6.67%) Kubernetes
2 2 (1.21%) rkt
3 1 (0.61%) Ansible
3 1 (0.61%) Progress Chef
3 1 (0.61%) Terraform
Vendors
1 21 (12.73%) Databricks
2 16 (9.70%) Microsoft
3 7 (4.24%) Pega
4 6 (3.64%) Amplitude
4 6 (3.64%) Oracle
5 4 (2.42%) OpenAI
5 4 (2.42%) SAP
5 4 (2.42%) ServiceNow
5 4 (2.42%) Splunk
6 3 (1.82%) Cognos
6 3 (1.82%) Informatica
7 2 (1.21%) Dynatrace
7 2 (1.21%) Google
7 2 (1.21%) Red Hat
7 2 (1.21%) TIBCO
8 1 (0.61%) Arqiva
8 1 (0.61%) Instagram
8 1 (0.61%) UiPath
8 1 (0.61%) Workday
8 1 (0.61%) YouTube