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

6 months to
24 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 515 378 341
Rank change year-on-year -137 -37 +74
Contract jobs citing R 165 183 236
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.30% 0.56% 0.62%
As % of the Programming Languages category 1.15% 1.68% 1.93%
Number of daily rates quoted 108 106 129
10th Percentile £259 £315 £308
25th Percentile £400 £413 £350
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £481 £500 £475
Median % change year-on-year -3.75% +5.26% -9.52%
75th Percentile £578 £594 £600
90th Percentile £660 £688 £663
UK excluding London median daily rate £437 £525 £450
% change year-on-year -16.76% +16.67% -14.29%
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% -57.00%
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% -66.28%

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 14,300 10,866 12,199
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.05% 32.96% 32.01%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,286 7,175 8,156
10th Percentile £363 £344 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £523 £505 £528
Median % change year-on-year +3.51% -4.27% -4.09%
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 556 292 342
10th Percentile £26.25 £29.00 £26.33
25th Percentile £46.63 £40.00 £46.18
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +3.17%
75th Percentile £70.00 £67.25 £70.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £78.75 £78.63
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £65.00

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 24 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 24 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 -140 146 £475 -5.00% 758
London -72 96 £525 - 413
UK excluding London -118 55 £437 -16.76% 424
Work from Home -93 44 £550 +7.32% 265
South East -71 12 £513 - 111
South West -31 10 £450 -47.98% 31
Yorkshire -28 8 £425 -9.33% 38
Midlands -50 8 £450 -18.18% 70
North of England -65 8 £425 +57.41% 102
East of England -46 7 £413 -26.67% 53
Scotland -22 5 £194 -64.66% 34
West Midlands -45 5 £451 -18.09% 35
Wales -12 3 £401 +6.64% 13
East Midlands -20 3 £252 -43.51% 35
Northern Ireland +5 2 £363 +3.57% 15

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 (7.27%) Apache Spark
2 5 (3.03%) Apache
3 3 (1.82%) Confluence
3 3 (1.82%) Jupyter
4 2 (1.21%) Apache Airflow
4 2 (1.21%) SAS
4 2 (1.21%) SharePoint
5 1 (0.61%) Apache Superset
5 1 (0.61%) Microsoft Exchange
5 1 (0.61%) nginx
5 1 (0.61%) R Markdown
Applications
1 29 (17.58%) Microsoft Excel
2 2 (1.21%) Spreadsheet
3 1 (0.61%) CPLEX
3 1 (0.61%) Microsoft Office
3 1 (0.61%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 1 (0.61%) SPSS
Business Applications
1 1 (0.61%) Monis
1 1 (0.61%) SAP APO
1 1 (0.61%) SAP IBP
Cloud Services
1 51 (30.91%) Power Platform
2 39 (23.64%) AWS
3 37 (22.42%) Azure
4 21 (12.73%) GCP
5 13 (7.88%) Snowflake
6 9 (5.45%) SaaS
7 8 (4.85%) GitHub
7 8 (4.85%) Serverless
8 6 (3.64%) Azure DevOps
9 5 (3.03%) Amazon S3
9 5 (3.03%) Azure Databricks
10 4 (2.42%) dbt
11 3 (1.82%) Google Analytics
11 3 (1.82%) Microsoft 365
12 2 (1.21%) Amazon EKS
12 2 (1.21%) AWS CloudFormation
12 2 (1.21%) Azure Synapse Analytics
12 2 (1.21%) Cloud Functions
12 2 (1.21%) Dagster
12 2 (1.21%) GitHub Actions
Communications & Networking
1 2 (1.21%) DSL
2 1 (0.61%) Cisco IOS
2 1 (0.61%) DNS
2 1 (0.61%) HTTPS
2 1 (0.61%) Reverse Proxy
2 1 (0.61%) SSL
2 1 (0.61%) VPN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 50 (30.30%) Power BI
2 40 (24.24%) Tableau
3 13 (7.88%) Data Warehouse
4 12 (7.27%) Big Data
5 11 (6.67%) BigQuery
6 10 (6.06%) Relational Database
7 6 (3.64%) Looker
7 6 (3.64%) Power Query
8 5 (3.03%) Data Lake
8 5 (3.03%) Delta Lake
9 4 (2.42%) Metadata
10 3 (1.82%) Amazon Athena
10 3 (1.82%) Apache Hive
10 3 (1.82%) Hadoop
10 3 (1.82%) NoSQL
10 3 (1.82%) PostgreSQL
10 3 (1.82%) RDBMS
10 3 (1.82%) SQLPlus
11 2 (1.21%) Data Mining
11 2 (1.21%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 11 (6.67%) Git
2 7 (4.24%) GitLab
3 6 (3.64%) RStudio
4 3 (1.82%) Jenkins
4 3 (1.82%) JIRA
5 2 (1.21%) Cucumber
5 2 (1.21%) Gatling
5 2 (1.21%) JUnit
5 2 (1.21%) Selenium
6 1 (0.61%) Maven
6 1 (0.61%) Sonatype Nexus
General
1 67 (40.61%) Analytical Skills
2 39 (23.64%) Social Skills
3 34 (20.61%) Public Sector
4 25 (15.15%) Finance
5 13 (7.88%) Marketing
6 10 (6.06%) Retail
7 9 (5.45%) Banking
8 7 (4.24%) Billing
8 7 (4.24%) Pharmaceutical
8 7 (4.24%) Telecoms
9 6 (3.64%) Military
10 5 (3.03%) Presentation Skills
11 4 (2.42%) Front Office
11 4 (2.42%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 4 (2.42%) Influencing Skills
12 3 (1.82%) Manufacturing
12 3 (1.82%) Organisational Skills
12 3 (1.82%) Publishing
13 2 (1.21%) Advertising
13 2 (1.21%) Police
Job Titles
1 57 (34.55%) Analyst
2 43 (26.06%) Data Analyst
3 24 (14.55%) Data Scientist
4 17 (10.30%) Senior
5 16 (9.70%) Data Engineer
6 13 (7.88%) Lead
7 11 (6.67%) Architect
8 10 (6.06%) SQL Analyst
9 9 (5.45%) Technical Analyst
10 8 (4.85%) Developer
11 7 (4.24%) Consultant
11 7 (4.24%) SQL Data Analyst
12 6 (3.64%) Senior Analyst
12 6 (3.64%) Software Engineer
13 5 (3.03%) Data Architect
13 5 (3.03%) Senior Data Analyst
13 5 (3.03%) Senior Data Scientist
14 4 (2.42%) Lead Data Scientist
14 4 (2.42%) Platform Architect
14 4 (2.42%) Platform Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 9 (5.45%) Terraform
2 7 (4.24%) PySpark
3 6 (3.64%) XML
4 5 (3.03%) PyTorch
4 5 (3.03%) REST
4 5 (3.03%) TensorFlow
5 4 (2.42%) .NET
5 4 (2.42%) JSON
5 4 (2.42%) React
6 3 (1.82%) Pandas
6 3 (1.82%) YAML
7 2 (1.21%) Apache Beam
7 2 (1.21%) FastAPI
7 2 (1.21%) JWT
7 2 (1.21%) Model Context Protocol
7 2 (1.21%) OLE
7 2 (1.21%) OpenTelemetry
7 2 (1.21%) Playwright
7 2 (1.21%) pytest
7 2 (1.21%) Shiny
Miscellaneous
1 13 (7.88%) Onboarding
2 10 (6.06%) Algorithms
3 8 (4.85%) Data Structures
4 6 (3.64%) CRISPR
4 6 (3.64%) Legacy Systems
5 5 (3.03%) Data Protection Act
6 4 (2.42%) Analytical Mindset
6 4 (2.42%) Cloud Native
7 3 (1.82%) AI Agents
7 3 (1.82%) BYOD
7 3 (1.82%) Product Ownership
7 3 (1.82%) Social Media
7 3 (1.82%) Taxonomies
8 2 (1.21%) Credit Risk
8 2 (1.21%) Fixed Income
8 2 (1.21%) Genomics
8 2 (1.21%) Mainframe
8 2 (1.21%) NHS
8 2 (1.21%) Omics
8 2 (1.21%) Reinsurance
Operating Systems
1 5 (3.03%) Linux
2 2 (1.21%) Unix
2 2 (1.21%) Windows
3 1 (0.61%) Amazon Linux
3 1 (0.61%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
3 1 (0.61%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 70 (42.42%) Analytics
2 58 (35.15%) Data Science
3 54 (32.73%) Business Intelligence
4 53 (32.12%) Visualisation
5 45 (27.27%) Data Pipeline
6 43 (26.06%) Decision-Making
7 41 (24.85%) Actionable Insight
8 39 (23.64%) Machine Learning
9 36 (21.82%) AI
10 32 (19.39%) Validation
11 31 (18.79%) Agile
11 31 (18.79%) Problem-Solving
12 30 (18.18%) Statistical Analysis
13 29 (17.58%) Data Visualisation
14 28 (16.97%) Stakeholder Management
15 25 (15.15%) Data Analysis
15 25 (15.15%) Mathematics
15 25 (15.15%) Statistical Modelling
16 24 (14.55%) Data Engineering
17 22 (13.33%) ETL
Programming Languages
1 144 (87.27%) Python
2 90 (54.55%) SQL
3 12 (7.27%) Java
4 10 (6.06%) C++
5 6 (3.64%) C#
5 6 (3.64%) JavaScript
6 5 (3.03%) Scala
7 4 (2.42%) Data Analysis Expressions
8 2 (1.21%) Bash
8 2 (1.21%) Cypher
8 2 (1.21%) PowerShell
8 2 (1.21%) SHACL
8 2 (1.21%) TypeScript
9 1 (0.61%) MATLAB
9 1 (0.61%) Shell Script
9 1 (0.61%) T-SQL
9 1 (0.61%) VB
Qualifications
1 28 (16.97%) Security Cleared
2 24 (14.55%) Degree
3 21 (12.73%) SC Cleared
4 8 (4.85%) BPSS Clearance
5 4 (2.42%) PhD
6 3 (1.82%) Master's Degree
7 2 (1.21%) Computer Science Degree
7 2 (1.21%) Microsoft Certified Professional
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 28 (16.97%) Data Quality
2 15 (9.09%) QA
3 5 (3.03%) Accessibility
3 5 (3.03%) SLA
4 4 (2.42%) Actionable Recommendations
4 4 (2.42%) GDPR
5 3 (1.82%) WCAG
6 2 (1.21%) California Consumer Privacy Act
6 2 (1.21%) Disclosure Scotland
6 2 (1.21%) IFRS
6 2 (1.21%) IFRS 17
6 2 (1.21%) Sarbanes-Oxley
System Software
1 5 (3.03%) Docker
2 1 (0.61%) Active Directory
Systems Management
1 7 (4.24%) Kubernetes
2 3 (1.82%) Grafana
3 2 (1.21%) Ansible
3 2 (1.21%) Argo
4 1 (0.61%) Microsoft Intune
4 1 (0.61%) Prometheus
4 1 (0.61%) Single Sign-On
4 1 (0.61%) systemd
Vendors
1 20 (12.12%) Databricks
1 20 (12.12%) Microsoft
2 10 (6.06%) Google
3 4 (2.42%) Oracle
4 3 (1.82%) FactSet
5 2 (1.21%) Amplitude
5 2 (1.21%) IBM
5 2 (1.21%) OpenAI
5 2 (1.21%) Sonatype
6 1 (0.61%) Adobe
6 1 (0.61%) Alteryx
6 1 (0.61%) Apple
6 1 (0.61%) Bloomberg
6 1 (0.61%) Cisco
6 1 (0.61%) Pega
6 1 (0.61%) Red Hat
6 1 (0.61%) Reuters
6 1 (0.61%) Riverbed
6 1 (0.61%) SAP