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

6 months to
16 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 453 364 387
Rank change year-on-year -89 +23 +57
Contract jobs citing R 177 173 205
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.39% 0.59% 0.47%
As % of the Programming Languages category 1.38% 1.73% 1.60%
Number of daily rates quoted 121 120 143
10th Percentile £350 £348 £325
25th Percentile £406 £406 £400
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £533 £542
Median % change year-on-year -6.10% -1.66% -1.55%
75th Percentile £575 £675 £638
90th Percentile £650 £777 £763
UK excluding London median daily rate £450 £475 £412
% change year-on-year -5.26% +15.29% -5.83%
Number of hourly rates quoted 5 7 13
10th Percentile £22.38 £22.00 £25.36
25th Percentile £25.21 £22.75 £25.50
Median hourly rate £43.00 £26.32 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +63.37% -38.07% -35.61%
75th Percentile £60.25 £56.25 £52.50
90th Percentile £60.37 £59.55 £72.93
UK excluding London median hourly rate £25.42 £23.00 £25.36
% change year-on-year +10.50% -9.31% -49.28%

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 12,818 9,981 12,837
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 27.91% 34.07% 29.29%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,539 6,742 9,122
10th Percentile £355 £356 £350
25th Percentile £413 £415 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £600 £638 £650
90th Percentile £713 £763 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £475 £488
% change year-on-year - -2.56% -2.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 544 241 477
10th Percentile £41.94 £22.50 £31.00
25th Percentile £55.00 £35.00 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +4.17% -4.00%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.50 £67.50
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £77.70
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £64.00 £62.50
% change year-on-year +1.56% +2.40% -

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 16 April 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 16 April 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 16 April 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 -90 156 £500 -7.41% 223
London -44 90 £525 -4.55% 77
Work from Home -14 69 £525 +7.97% 46
UK excluding London -100 62 £450 -5.26% 187
South East -47 15 £569 +54.76% 48
North of England -63 14 £475 +4.40% 44
Midlands -68 14 £395 -3.54% 25
South West -27 10 £450 -32.84% 21
East Midlands -28 9 £385 +31.40% 16
North West -31 9 £530 +16.51% 15
East of England -45 8 £413 -36.54% 30
West Midlands -64 5 £438 +1.39% 9
Yorkshire -52 4 £425 +21.43% 18
Wales -14 1 £425 - 9
North East - 1 £475 - 11

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 36 (20.34%) Apache Spark
2 11 (6.21%) Apache
3 7 (3.95%) SAS
4 5 (2.82%) SharePoint
5 4 (2.26%) Apache Superset
6 2 (1.13%) Apache Airflow
7 1 (0.56%) Confluence
7 1 (0.56%) Jupyter
7 1 (0.56%) R Markdown
Applications
1 15 (8.47%) Microsoft Excel
2 2 (1.13%) Microsoft Office
3 1 (0.56%) Chatbot
3 1 (0.56%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 2 (1.13%) SAP IBP
2 1 (0.56%) Salesforce CRM
2 1 (0.56%) SAP APO
2 1 (0.56%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 63 (35.59%) Power Platform
2 51 (28.81%) AWS
3 47 (26.55%) Azure
4 18 (10.17%) GCP
5 8 (4.52%) Power Automate
5 8 (4.52%) PowerApps
6 7 (3.95%) Snowflake
7 6 (3.39%) Azure Data Factory
8 5 (2.82%) Azure DevOps
8 5 (2.82%) Microsoft Purview
9 3 (1.69%) Amazon S3
9 3 (1.69%) Azure Synapse Analytics
9 3 (1.69%) Copilot Studio
9 3 (1.69%) dbt
9 3 (1.69%) OpenShift
9 3 (1.69%) Serverless
10 2 (1.13%) Amazon EMR
10 2 (1.13%) Amazon Kinesis
10 2 (1.13%) Cloud Computing
10 2 (1.13%) Google Analytics
Communications & Networking
1 1 (0.56%) 2G
1 1 (0.56%) 5G
1 1 (0.56%) LTE
1 1 (0.56%) Mobile Backhaul
1 1 (0.56%) VoIP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 63 (35.59%) Power BI
2 48 (27.12%) Tableau
3 33 (18.64%) Big Data
4 24 (13.56%) Hadoop
5 21 (11.86%) Data Warehouse
6 11 (6.21%) Looker
7 9 (5.08%) Power Query
8 8 (4.52%) Relational Database
9 7 (3.95%) Delta Lake
9 7 (3.95%) Metadata
9 7 (3.95%) Mixpanel
9 7 (3.95%) Spark SQL
10 6 (3.39%) Data Lake
11 5 (2.82%) NoSQL
11 5 (2.82%) SQL Server
12 4 (2.26%) Amazon Athena
12 4 (2.26%) Amazon Redshift
12 4 (2.26%) Data Mining
13 3 (1.69%) BigQuery
14 2 (1.13%) Parquet
Development Applications
1 10 (5.65%) Git
2 3 (1.69%) Jenkins
3 2 (1.13%) MLflow
4 1 (0.56%) Bitbucket
4 1 (0.56%) JIRA
4 1 (0.56%) RStudio
General
1 54 (30.51%) Analytical Skills
2 50 (28.25%) Social Skills
3 37 (20.90%) Finance
4 32 (18.08%) Public Sector
5 12 (6.78%) Pharmaceutical
6 11 (6.21%) Marketing
7 10 (5.65%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 6 (3.39%) Telecoms
9 4 (2.26%) Banking
10 3 (1.69%) Influencing Skills
10 3 (1.69%) Presentation Skills
11 2 (1.13%) Documentation Skills
11 2 (1.13%) Financial Institution
11 2 (1.13%) Retail
11 2 (1.13%) Social Science
12 1 (0.56%) Billing
12 1 (0.56%) Front Office
12 1 (0.56%) Local Government
12 1 (0.56%) Manufacturing
12 1 (0.56%) Private Banking
Job Titles
1 54 (30.51%) Data Scientist
2 31 (17.51%) Analyst
3 27 (15.25%) Data Analyst
4 26 (14.69%) Senior
5 20 (11.30%) Data Engineer
6 17 (9.60%) Developer
7 15 (8.47%) Senior Data Scientist
8 10 (5.65%) Architect
8 10 (5.65%) Lead
9 9 (5.08%) Consultant
10 6 (3.39%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
10 6 (3.39%) Business Intelligence Developer
10 6 (3.39%) Data Consultant
10 6 (3.39%) Lead Data Scientist
11 5 (2.82%) Azure Engineer
11 5 (2.82%) Java Developer
11 5 (2.82%) Power BI Developer
11 5 (2.82%) Senior Analyst
11 5 (2.82%) Software Engineer
12 4 (2.26%) Business Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 13 (7.34%) TensorFlow
2 11 (6.21%) Pandas
3 10 (5.65%) PyTorch
4 9 (5.08%) PySpark
4 9 (5.08%) scikit-learn
5 8 (4.52%) JSON
6 6 (3.39%) Keras
6 6 (3.39%) Shiny
7 5 (2.82%) YAML
8 4 (2.26%) LangChain
8 4 (2.26%) Matplotlib
8 4 (2.26%) NumPy
8 4 (2.26%) Seaborn
9 3 (1.69%) Kafka
9 3 (1.69%) Plotly
10 2 (1.13%) FastAPI
10 2 (1.13%) Hugging Face
10 2 (1.13%) NLTK
10 2 (1.13%) Prophet
10 2 (1.13%) XGBoost
Miscellaneous
1 15 (8.47%) Algorithms
2 8 (4.52%) Cloud Native
3 7 (3.95%) CRISPR
4 6 (3.39%) Product Ownership
5 5 (2.82%) Credit Risk
5 5 (2.82%) Self-Motivation
6 4 (2.26%) Data Structures
6 4 (2.26%) Multi-touch
7 3 (1.69%) AI Agents
7 3 (1.69%) Data Protection Act
7 3 (1.69%) Hybrid Cloud
7 3 (1.69%) Management Information System
7 3 (1.69%) Onboarding
8 2 (1.13%) Analytical Mindset
8 2 (1.13%) Distributed Computing
8 2 (1.13%) Distributed Systems
8 2 (1.13%) Legacy Systems
8 2 (1.13%) Mainframe
9 1 (0.56%) Data Fabric
9 1 (0.56%) Virtual Reality
Operating Systems
1 3 (1.69%) Linux
2 2 (1.13%) Unix
3 1 (0.56%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 95 (53.67%) Analytics
1 95 (53.67%) Data Science
2 75 (42.37%) Visualisation
3 68 (38.42%) Machine Learning
4 63 (35.59%) Business Intelligence
5 50 (28.25%) Decision-Making
6 44 (24.86%) Data Pipeline
7 42 (23.73%) Data Visualisation
8 39 (22.03%) Problem-Solving
9 38 (21.47%) Actionable Insight
10 37 (20.90%) Data Analysis
11 36 (20.34%) Data Modelling
12 35 (19.77%) Statistical Modelling
13 34 (19.21%) Agile
14 33 (18.64%) Data Analytics
15 32 (18.08%) AI
16 29 (16.38%) Data Governance
17 27 (15.25%) Statistics
18 26 (14.69%) Dashboard Development
19 25 (14.12%) Validation
Programming Languages
1 168 (94.92%) Python
2 129 (72.88%) SQL
3 13 (7.34%) Java
4 11 (6.21%) Data Analysis Expressions
5 7 (3.95%) JavaScript
5 7 (3.95%) Scala
6 6 (3.39%) C#
6 6 (3.39%) C++
7 3 (1.69%) TypeScript
8 2 (1.13%) Ada
8 2 (1.13%) VBA
9 1 (0.56%) LookML
9 1 (0.56%) SAS Macro
Qualifications
1 50 (28.25%) Security Cleared
2 42 (23.73%) SC Cleared
3 32 (18.08%) Degree
4 7 (3.95%) Computer Science Degree
5 6 (3.39%) Master's Degree
5 6 (3.39%) Microsoft Certification
5 6 (3.39%) PhD
6 4 (2.26%) BPSS Clearance
7 3 (1.69%) Azure Certification
8 2 (1.13%) Tableau Certification
9 1 (0.56%) CIMA
9 1 (0.56%) CTC Cleared
9 1 (0.56%) DBS Check
9 1 (0.56%) DV Cleared
9 1 (0.56%) Numerate Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 22 (12.43%) Data Quality
2 11 (6.21%) Actionable Recommendations
3 8 (4.52%) QA
4 7 (3.95%) GDPR
5 3 (1.69%) Accessibility
6 2 (1.13%) PCI DSS
6 2 (1.13%) WCAG
7 1 (0.56%) MiFID
7 1 (0.56%) Sarbanes-Oxley
System Software
1 4 (2.26%) Docker
2 2 (1.13%) HDFS
Systems Management
1 9 (5.08%) Kubernetes
2 6 (3.39%) Terraform
Vendors
1 21 (11.86%) Databricks
2 18 (10.17%) Microsoft
3 7 (3.95%) Amplitude
4 5 (2.82%) OpenAI
4 5 (2.82%) Pega
5 4 (2.26%) Google
5 4 (2.26%) ServiceNow
6 3 (1.69%) Informatica
6 3 (1.69%) Oracle
6 3 (1.69%) Red Hat
6 3 (1.69%) SAP
7 2 (1.13%) Splunk
8 1 (0.56%) Adobe
8 1 (0.56%) Alteryx
8 1 (0.56%) Cognos
8 1 (0.56%) Salesforce
8 1 (0.56%) UiPath